Category: Games Writers Play

“I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. Hemingway taught me the finest trick : ‘When you are going good, stop writing.’ You don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? You make yourself stop and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next.” — Roald Dahl

No matter how productive you are as a writer, it’s doubtful you can write all the time.   At some point, you’ve got to call it a day, even if it’s just to catch a few hours of sleep.  The question is, where do you stop?  What’s the best way to quit so that you have the easiest time starting again the next time you sit down to string some words together?

Easy:  Stop when you’re on a roll.

In other words, stop when the words are flowing, when you know where the story’s going, when you can vividly see the road ahead.  It’s much easier to get those creative juices flowing if you’re not staring at a blank white page.  I sometimes even stop in the middle of a sentence.

This is actually harder to do than it seems, because when you’re in one of those creative fugue states, you don’t want to quit, but that’s actually the reason why you should.  You’re quitting the writing session in a positive mental state and with plenty of momentum.

Note:  Now that I’m on a bit of a roll myself, I’m going to be taking a break from the Games Writers Play series.  I’ll likely pick it up again at some point, but I want to focus 100% of my creative energy on the new novel.  Thanks to everyone for reading, and an especially big thank you to those who donated!

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

“I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true – hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice.” — Ray Bradbury

I hesitate even mentioning this game, not because it’s not good, but because it’s so famous that it seems superfluous.  But because it is such a great writing game I want to include it in my series.

Write a novel of at least 50,000 words in one month.

That’s right, we’re talking about the same game that motivates thousands of people around the world in the month of November:  National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short.  If you want extra encouragement, check out their site and participate in the month of November.  But you don’t have to do it in the month of November.  Any month will do.

Now for those of you crying out that no good books could possibly be written in a month, I must remind you that Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days in the basement of UCLA’s library on a coin-operated typewriter.  And fifty thousand words, divided by 30, is about 1700 words a day.  Even if you have a job, if you just dedicate your evenings to it for a month, you should be able to do it.  Why, if take a look at their site, you’ll see that lots people have.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

This is another game that works best if you you’re using a book or story you haven’t read — much easier to let your imagination go where it wants go.  Here’s how it works:

Pick a book or short story at random.  Type the first line and only the first line into a blank document.  Now write a couple pages using that first line to see if it sparks a new story.

If it’s a famous first line, you’re better off deleting or modifying it when you’re done to avoid the inevitable comparisons (unless you’re doing a parody), but otherwise most first lines are not all that memorable.

I call this game “Forking From the First Line,” because essentially what you’re doing is taking a different fork in the road from that first line.  For kicks, you could go back and read the other writer’s short story or novel later on, to see how different they are.  And trust me, they’re going to be very different.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com

Here’s another technique to take advantage of a fairly well-known fact, which is that some of the best new ideas come from combining two unrelated ideas together.

One of the ways I like to do this is by doing what I call Crazy Hollywood Pitches.  It’s fairly straightforward:  Make four or five columns of movie titles, separated by genre (horror, science fiction, romantic comedy, etc.), and then combine them at random in a MOVIE TITLE #1 meets MOVIE TITLE #2 fashion.

So let’s say I have Driving Miss Daisy in one column, and the first three movie titles in my science fiction column are Star Wars, Blade Runner, and Dune.  That would give me . . .

• Driving Miss Daisy meets Star Wars
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Blade Runner
• Driving Miss Daisy meets Dune

If you’re laughing out loud at these, that’s great.  This should be fun.  Laughter is a tonic for a tired imagination.  But then ask yourself how you might really make one of these crazy pitches into a story, and don’t be afraid to change the idea to see where it leads you.  What if the story’s about an android driver shuttling a prejudiced old man to his retirement home on another planet?  What if their ship crashes?  What happens next?

It’s just one idea.  If it doesn’t lead anywhere, scrap it and try another.  If you’re looking for an easy way to make lists of movie titles, try IMDB.com.

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One of the ways I can justify writing these “Games Writers Play” posts for free is by putting a donate button at the bottom of these posts.  If you find them useful, even a small donation of a couple dollars helps justify my time.  If you can’t donate, please help spread the word by linking to these posts.  Thanks!

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All posts in this series can be found at
www.gameswritersplay.com