Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers

Tongue twisters are fantastic comedy devices when used well. There's a particular episode of the old cartoon Pinky and the Brain that shows the sheer cleverness and joy to be found in finding tongue-twisting ways of saying perfectly ordinary things. It's available on youtube - go watch, I'll wait.

Now that you know what I'm talking about - the writing exercise is to create your own version of this. Take some kind of set up with several components (in the above example, we have the sheet slitters, the sock pluckers and sack pickers, as well as the buggy bumpers and the toy boat) and reinvent names for them that repeat syllables with minor variations, then create your skit.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

This one's great when you're having difficulty with a particular story or character - when you can't work out where to go, what to do, or why it isn't working.

Talk to yourself

It's simple - get a pen and paper (or computer and keyboard) and start talking to yourself. Write for at least ten minutes, though a lot of people find this can go on for half an hour or so before they feel they've finished. Similar to the Unstoppable pen, just keep rambling - ask yourself questions (written down) and answer them, branch off to other questions, sequey into musings and other random things.

If you're stuck for a beginning, try addressing the point that's bothering you. "I'm not writing the story because...", "This isn't working because...", etc. It's highly likely you'll have no idea what the answer to those are at the start, but by about halfway through you'll find yourself spouting random epiphanies about your process, your story, your relationship with your parents, everything.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Out of habit

Writers, and indeed any artist or creator who relies at least in part on inspiration to function, have a tendency to rely on magic habits. Tuesday morning, 7am in the third left chair of the coffee shop on the corner, with an A5 notebook and a chewed-up fountain pen. Monday, after the ironing, before the dishes with an unlit candle and Enya on iTunes. Whatever yours is - a formula that you feel you can write with.

It probably does work for you. I have some of my own - I get up at 5 several days a week to by in the city by 7am. My shift doesn't start until 8:30, but by leaving early I miss peak hour traffic, get a free train ticket and ninety minutes of relative peace in the university before it opens. I write then - it's one of the few times I've managed to carve out successfully for regular writing.

The challenge here is simple - work out what your habits are - place, time, implements, and try changing them all. If you write in the mornings on computer in your office, take a notebook to the park in the afternoon. If you're a notebook-in-the-coffee-shop person, try writing in your lunchbreak at work on the computer (check your work's policies before you try that one, though.)

Mix up your habits. For one thing, it'll show you that you don't need those totems to write. Want, maybe, but not need. You could still write if you didn't have them. But the change will also free up your creativity a little - you may find new ideas, new expressions and new connections forming, which will improve your writing in general.

 

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Three's a crowd

What's to the left of you, right now? Some paperwork? Your coffee? A plaster wall? Whatever it is, that's your topic. You're going to write at least three people having an argument (or a general discussion, but arguments tend to be easier, and more fun) about that topic. The paperwork isn't done. The coffee-pot is never refilled, or it's always refilled with the wrong coffee. The plaster needs to be painted blue, not yellow. Three people are about to have a flaming row over this, but that's the easy bit.

The trick is - you're not allowed to use any speech tags. No 'said', 'muttered', 'yelled', 'replied', 'screamed', 'snorted' or 'expostulated'. Nothing. You have to indicate who is speaking just using grammatical indicators (a new person speaking or acting starts a new line) and speech mannerisms - what they say, and how they say it. And you'll need to do this - two people in an argument can take turns. Three people can't. So you'll need to construct things very carefully to make it clear who's speaking.

Make the argument a silly, vindictive or vicious as you like, and feel free to let the topic ramble, or have people dredge up past grievances as ammunition. You just can't use speech tags.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Downsizing

You can do this with a story you already have, or write one specifically for it. The challenges are different for either - perhaps working from an existing story is closer to the 'spirit' of things - you might be inclined to 'cheat' with padding if you're writing one for it, but either works. This is also a really good exercise if you're struggling with a query for a novel, or if you're trying to figure what a story's actually about.

Start with a story that's at least 1000 words long. Your first challenge is to rewrite it in 500 words*. It must still work as a story - a beginning, middle and end, logical progression, arcs, prose that pulls the reader along. That means you're not just converting the story from 'show' to 'tell', and you're not just cutting out every second and third sentence. It has to be reimagined, re worked.

Don't start from a "what can I cut" perspective - it'll take forever, and won't work. The story will have to change or simplify - maybe the perspective, the details or the way you're telling it. Fewer characters, more straightforward plot. That's okay, it doesn't damage or change your original story - what you're doing is giving yourself another perspective on what the story really is.

Once you have your 500 word version, take that version (not the original) and write it in 100 words. Again, you'll have to simplify and streamline it to get it to work as a story within the limit.

When you have your 100 word story, make it a sentence. A whole story in a sentence. Here's where you'll have to be very economical with words - nothing can be wasted. If you doubt you can, just think of Hemingway's now near-legendary six word story - For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

*If you're working with a novel, try going to a few thousand words first, and then to 500. 100,000 to 500 can be a little difficult.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Eavesdropping

You need to be somewhere where either people make phone calls, or people have conversations but it's noisy enough that you can only hear one side. Train stations, airports, cafes, office cubicles, supermarkets and the foyer of expensive restaurants usually work. Each place will often have its own 'tone' of conversation, too, so try a variety of places with this one.

The first step is simple, albeit not particularly polite - listen in on someone's phone conversation, or one person's side of a face-to-face conversation, and note it down. Write down everything they say, as close to verbatim as possible. If you can do shorthand, so much the better.

You'll need to be reasonably circumspect - as a general rule, people don't like you recording their conversations, and in some places it may even be illegal, even though you're not intending anything harmful with it. Be careful. If they walk out of earshot and you haven't got much, don't follow them (unless it's really easy to do so inconspicuously, like at a train station). You can take snippets of several people's conversation and glue them together for much the same result.

Once you have your conversation, sit down and examine what they're saying. Forget trying to figure out what they actually were talking about - now it's time to imagine what they could have been discussing. Secret spy code-words, clandestine liasons, illicit business deals, broken hearts, new love, old arguments - whatever triggers your imagination. Feel free to make it a conference call, if need be - two, three, four other people on the line, butting in. The only rule is you can't change the speech you've recorded - that's what was said. Though it wasn't necessarily all said by the same person, if that works better for you.

Now write the scene of that conversation. They don't have to be on the phone, they could be in a living room together or on opposite sides of the galaxy with half a year between each sentence as the message travels across space. Write not just the dialogue, but the whole scene of that conversation - what they're doing, feeling, seeing, touching, smelling. See where it goes.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Whose line is it anyway?

This is best played with a group of four or five, but it's doable by yourself with a little adjustment. The idea is to write a story, one line each. Except you only get to see the line immediately before yours. So, with a group of four people - A, B, C and D:

A writes the first line. B reads A's line, and writes the second line. C read's B's line but can't read A's, and writes the third line. D reads C's line, but not B's or A's, and writes the fourth. A takes it back, reads D's line, but not he first four, and writes the fifth, etc.

With groups beyond five or six, there are too many different minds and ideas, and you tend to get surrealism - it's fun, but it's not going to make sense at all. It can be fun to have a theme, a central idea, or for each person to have an object they have to work in to their line - there are a lot of variations that I should probably save for another post.

You can do this over email, or in a writing group - I wrote a couple of short stories with a friend over email this way - one sentence each at a time. If it's in a face-to-face group, it's often best to run several at once, so people don't get bored waiting for their turn.

Alternatives:

Same concept, but you're writing the story backwards - A writes the last line, B writes the line before that, etc. Kind of a blend between this and Working Backwards.

If you don't have people to write with, you can play this yourself - write one sentence a day, and only allow yourself to look at the previous sentence. If you're a pen-and-paper person, you can do this by using looseleaf that you fold down as you go to hide the previous lines, if you work on computer, you can write it backwards - open the file, and your most recent line is at the start. Insert a page break, and write today's line. Next day, open it, and yesterday's line's at the top; insert a page break again, and write the next line. You'll have to swap it back around when you're done, though.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

'E's not here

Write anything you like, about anything. A letter, the next chapter, your shopping list. You just can't use the letter 'e'.Any word that has an 'e' in it is out of bounds. No exceptions, not even for names. Yes, I know this makes pronouns all-but-impossible.

No deliberately forgetting how to spell words just so you can have them without an 'e'.

This works in a different way to the other games - instead of forgetting about the words, this forces you to focus on nothing but - and by enforcing such strict rules, you're automatically forgiven for writing painful nonsense.

A slightly easier version is to omit the letters S, T or I. The resulting text is probably more useful, or more likely usable in a piece of writing, but it's nowhere near as much fun.

You can also use this to help train yourself out of words or phrases you commonly use. If, for example, you have a tendency to put 'just' all over the place - just as he was about to weep, he saw the sunlight peeking just over the top of the tree he had just trimmed - take the least-common letter that your phrase requires (j, in this case) as your forbidden letter.

 

Sorry for the lack of posting, folks - been setting up new computers and adjusting to new schedules. Will be back on track soon.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

The unstoppable pen

Get a pen and paper, (or keyboard and word processor) and a timer that goes "beep" when the time runs out. It's important that it makes sound, so you can forget that it's there.

Set the timer for fifteen minutes (or more, if you're adventurous). Pick up your pen (or open your word document) and type the first word. Just the first word. It doesn't really matter what word it is, so here's one: Under. 

Now start the timer, and write. You are not allowed to stop, edit, pause or break until the timer beeps. Not even if the cat jumps on the keyboard and knocks over the petunias. If you run out of words, start writing about the fact that you've run out of words^. Only go forwards, as fast as your fingers can write or type. This is why you need a timer that makes noise - you don't want the excuse of pausing to look at it all the time.

When the timer beeps, you can stop.

If you like this game, there's an entire website called write or die devoted to it that will, depending on what settings you choose, poke you gently to keep writing if you've paused for too long, or even start erasing what you've written. You can even purchase a program to do the same on your system, without an internet connection.

^ Alternative schools of thought will have you repeat the last word you wrote over and over until the next one presents itself - it depends if you're someone who is likely to chatter themselves back to the story at hand given self-referential comments, or someone who'll blunder off into talking about their day, the process of writing, what's stuck to their shoe, etc. Neither one is a bad thing - you're still writing. It just depends which one you prefer.

A third alternative is a chosen set phrase, such as I don't know what to write, repeated over and over until the next thing to write comes to mind. Personally, I find this too restrictive - part of the joy is the free flowing association, and forcing yourself to one specific phrase whenever you're lost seems to defeat the purpose.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Working Backwards

I find this helps on the days when everything coming out of your brain is foul sludge from the OverWritten Swamps of the planet Cliche, when I know where I need to be, but not how to get there, or for [insert individual reason here] I'm finding a scene particularly impossible.

It breaks your mind away from the standard word-after-word process, and stops you focussing on the wrong areas of your craft, and frees you from the standard "what happened next" approach that can stall your mind.

You can do this one at word level, sentence level, paragraph level or even chapter/page level. My personal preference is sentence level - it's far easier to put a paragraph together backwards than it is a sentence, and inserting entire paragraphs behind each other feels to much like cut-and-paste - your mileage may vary, of course. So:

Write the last sentence of your story (or chapter, or scene). Write the sentence that comes right before that.  Write the sentence that comes before that. Work your way back to the start of the paragraph. Repeat with either the previous paragraph or the next paragraph, depending on which works better for your brain.

And you have to build it backwards - no cheating by deciding working it all out fowards first. I find it works best on a computer, where insert-stuff-before-here is simple. If you're stuck with a notepad and pen, write them one after the other, so the story's in the "wrong" order, then transcribe it into the right order when you edit.

Alternatives

Word level - build the actual sentences backwards. Last word, then second-last word, then third-last word, etc. Paragraph level - build the scene or chapter backwards, writing each paragraph forwards. So, write te last paragraph in a scene, then the secon- last, third-last, etc. Chapter/Page level - build the entire story backwards. Write the last chapter (or page, if it's a short), then the second-last, then the third-last, etc. Combine any or all of the above.

Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Someone Else's Sentence

Take the book nearest you*, flip it open to a random page. Close your eyes, point to a paragraph. Choose the sentence in that paragraph that most appeals to you. Not the one you think might be 'easiest', or fits best with what you're already thinking, the sentence that you find most interesting, most creative, most evocative. The one that resonates. You can only pick one.

That's your opening sentence. Word for word, copy it down. Now, your next sentence cannot be anything like the one that comes after your chosen sentence in the book. It must be completely different in intention, in direction of plot, everything^. Think it up, write it down. Now shut the book, and put it down.

You have your opening two sentences. Start writing.

* Unless it's a maths book, or a book on biochemistry. Oddly enough, I've found this actually works quite well with physics textbooks.

^ You set the second one up so that you're not tempted to go back to the book and just paraphrase what they've written. The first one gives you your hook, the second one turns that hook in a new direction.

Now that I have other projects out the way, I'm redeveloping the blog a little in terms of content - I have a tendency to write lengthy posts, and they take up a lot of the time that I'm supposed to be using for writing. So, in the interests of snatching some of that time back and introducing more variety to the blog, I'm bringing in some new concepts for some of the regular posts.

One of them is writing games - tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Random Objects

It's a simple game: look around you, right now, and take six to ten objects. Try to make them mostly unrelated; if you're in an office, look out the window as well, or in the fridge, on your coworker's desk, open a book to a random page and take the first noun you find. Six to ten objects.

Now put them in a story - and not as background fodder, make these objects integral to the story - the stapler is the reason someone got fired; the chocolate body paint in the fridge is somebody's lunch (true story, that). They can't all be the MacGuffin, obviously, but at least one of them has to be central to the plot.

The point is to make your brain stretch for how someone could get fired over a stapler, what kind of colleague would enjoy chocolate body paint on toast.