Month: June 2010

“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

“Writers are, pretty much thieves, stealing ideas from other people who didn’t have the foresight to write them down, and then from the people who did have the foresight to write them down.”  — Lemony Snicket

Probably the number one question I get asked — especially by people who aren’t writers — is where I get my ideas.  The truth is, ideas are a dime a dozen.  They can come from anywhere.  It’s what you do with those ideas that matters.  One of the common mistakes that a lot of beginning writers make is thinking that ideas are a finite resource, that if you think of a good one then you’d better protect it fiercely because you don’t want anyone “stealing it” from you.

In actual practice I’ve often found that the ideas that I find most precious, the ones that I hold onto the longest, turning them over in my mind, shaping and molding them, don’t often turn out as well as the ones I think up on the spot.  I think this has something to do with letting an idea go where it takes you rather than trying to force an idea into a preconceived box.

Here’s a technique that I like to call “ripped from the headlines,” to borrow Law and Order’s tagline, that can help you think up ideas on the spot: Use a newspaper headline to generate a story question.  Don’t read the article.  Just use the headline to ask questions.

Instead of an actual newspaper, head over to a news search site like http://news.google.com and type in something like “burglary.”  You’ll come up with a bunch of articles.  Choose one that raises questions in your mind.  Trying it now, here’s one that jumps out at me:  “Teenagers Arrested In Marina For Burglary.”

Who are these teenagers?  What were they doing in the marina?  What were they stealing?  Don’t settle for the first answer that comes to mind.  Push a little further.  Maybe one of the teenagers was stealing a rare comic book from an artist everyone thought was dead, a guy living on a small yacht, and the other teenager was trying to stop him.  Maybe this crime leads to an unusual friendship.

Who knows.  You can go anywhere once you have the headline.  It’s just a place to start, and sometimes that’s all you need.

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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