Games Writers Play – Page 5 – Scott William Carter

Games Writers Play #9: The Race

March 16, 2010March 23, 2010Scott William Carter

All of this productivity begs the question: What are you doing with all this writing? Are you putting these novels, short stories, articles, haikus, or whatever else you’re writing into the mail to people who can pay you money for them? If you want to be a professional writer, and not merely a dabbler, then I truly hope so.

In this Games series, I’m mostly focusing on tips, techniques, and mental gimmicks that writers use to get down the words. But I’m assuming that you want to be read, and not only that, but that you want to be compensated fairly for your efforts.

For a lot of writers, actually putting their work in an envelope and mailing it to an editor (or via email, which is becoming more common these days) is a major hurdle. Believe me, I understand. Those rejections can be painful.

But the more you can make the submission process into a game, one that’s even a little fun, the less you worry about the rejections. So here’s something called The Race that a lot of writers have used to achieve publishing success — invented by writer Dean Wesley Smith back in the 1980s and used as a motivational tool by lots of writers today. Here’s how it works:

You get one point for every short story you’ve submitted to an editor
You get 3 points for every partial — meaning opening chapters and synopsis/proposal — you’ve submitted to an editor
You get 8 points for every completed novel you’ve submitted to an editor

You can only count each work once. When the work sells and you receive the check — this is important, because lots of deals fall through at the last minute — then you remove the points.

The Race works best when you have a lot of writers posting on a weekly basis, everybody sharing their points. Create a listserv so everybody knows where everybody stands and make sure the people who participate are only positive and encouraging to others. It’s not a game that works for everyone, but since you’re really only competing with yourself, it tends to work fairly well for most writers. And of course you can use this game by yourself, setting a goal of reaching 100 points or some other number that makes you reach.

Since it places the emphasis on submitting, and not selling, the focus is on an area you as a writer can control. On a listserv I’m on, it’s almost always the writers with the most points in the Race that are doing the best as far as selling and moving up the career ladder. Imagine that?

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Games Writers Play #8: Literate an Illustration

March 9, 2010March 4, 2010Scott William Carter

Here’s a technique I’ve used a few times to get the creative juices flowing. You’ve read an illustrated book, right? Usually, the writer writes a story and then the illustrator reads the story (hopefully) and creates an illustration based on it. Some illustrations become so wedded to the original work — think Sidney Paget’s illustrations of Sherlock Holmes stories — that they become almost inseparable in the reader’s mind. But why not the opposite?

Here’s how the technique works: Find a painting and write a story based on it.

It doesn’t have to be a painting. It could be a photo. It could be a photo of a sculpture. But whatever it is, the key is to find something that evokes an emotional response.

So much of art is just a response to other art. It’s a continuous conversation, and by playing this game you get to take part in it. And if you’re worried about “stealing” someone’s idea, don’t be. Beyond staying away from trademarked characters — Spiderman, Star Wars, etc. — you have nothing to worry about. When I use this technique, I usually go to the Internet, copy the image, and paste it right into my document. Of course, you never send this out, or post it online, because it’s quite likely that image is copyrighted, but there’s nothing wrong with using that photo or painting for inspiration so long as it stays on your computer.

A few other suggestions:

Try using a search engine, searching specifically for images. For example: http://images.google.com. Type something like “girl with bucket” or “haunted house” and see if something grabs you.
A site like Deviant Art is great for illustrations: http://www.deviantart.com/
Flickr, a photo sharing site, is another great one to try: http://www.flickr.com/explore/

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Games Writers Play #7: Write As Much as You Can in an Hour

March 2, 2010February 16, 2010Scott William Carter

I personally believe that setting word or page quotas is much more effective than time quotas. This is mostly because if you tell yourself you’re going to sit in the chair until you’ve written a thousand words, you’ll find your fingers leaping into action much faster than if your fingers know that all you have to do is sit in the chair for an hour to call it a success. (I realize we’re attributing a lot of independent brain power to those fingers, but bear with me.) But I know that word quotas just don’t work for everyone. Some people find themselves freezing up if they know they have to write a certain number of pages.

I still can’t quite recommend just saying “write for an hour,” because that goes against some of the basic writing principles that I believe — that writing faster is generally better, that anything you can do to encourage yourself to write faster is helpful in keeping ahead of your critical voice.

So here’s a variation that works for me: Write as many words as you possibly can in one hour, and then track your progress.

Or thirty minutes. Or fifteen minutes. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to start with less time and work your way up. Maybe you start by writing 250 words in an hour. Then it goes up to 500. Soon it’s 750. Rather than focusing on something you can’t control — why a particular story or novel hasn’t sold, etc. — you’ll have a measurable way to evaluate your success in an area you can control. And that’s definitely a good thing.

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Games Writers Play #6: Pages Before Play

February 23, 2010February 16, 2010Scott William Carter

If you’ve followed my blog, you know I’ve written about the Pages Before Play principle before, but it’s so effective that it deserves a mention here.

The basic idea is this: You withhold all activities you enjoy until you’ve met your page quota for the day.

It’s simple, isn’t it? Surfing the Internet, reading books, watching television or movies, playing video games — whatever you do for fun in your free time, you don’t allow yourself to do those things until you’ve met your quota. The idea is to use those activities as extra motivation to get your pages done — and not only done, but done sooner and faster.

More than any other principle, this is one I’ve tried to live by. I’ve found it to be one of the most effective ways to keep myself focused. My big Achilles heel is the Internet. It’s easy to tell myself I’m just going to check my email, five minutes tops, and the next thing I know I’m off ogling a gadget on Gizmodo or arguing with some pinheaded pundit (in my head of course) on Politico. Before I know it, an hour is gone — and the time I would have devoted to writing some new pages is gone with it.

But I also have to say: Although it’s a deceptively simple game, and tremendously effective, I’ve also found it to be incredibly difficult in actual practice. I’m always falling off the wagon. Temptations abound, after all.

That’s okay. You’re going to fall off the wagon. Just get back on again. It’s also a great game to whip out now and then as a corrective measure, when you find your productivity dropping. You want to watch Lost? All right, buddy, then get those pages done.

(A lot of people use a variation of this game, but here’s a hat tip to two of them who emailed me something along these lines:: Michael Jasper and Cyn Balog)

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