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

Unless you’re living in a vortex where time doesn’t pass — hey, I do write science fiction now and again — all of us have the same twenty-four hours in a day.  Part of being more productive as a writer certainly has to do with different tricks and techniques to increase the quality and quantity of our output when we actually sit down to write — improving our discipline, expanding our creativity, the things I’ve largely been focusing on for the past nineteen games.  But what about just finding more time?

If you’re serious about becoming a professional writer, there’s no way around it:  It’s going to take a huge time commitment.  If you want to dabble and play at it, treating it like a hobby, you can do that on an ad hoc basis, but that’s just not going to cut it if you have lofty ambitions.  You’re going to have to put in many hours of practice.

If you want more time, take a hard look at where your time is going now.  What can you give up?  One of the things I’ve mostly given up is television, which is a pretty big time sink for most of us.

Try giving it up for a week or a month.  You might be amazed at how much more writing you get done.

Now, I’m not one of those people that claim that television is bad for you, or that there’s nothing on, or that it’s a mind control device used by the government to keep us from rebelling.  I actually think there’s far more good shows than there were ten years ago.  There’s also more terrible shows.  There’s just more, which is why we have a bit of both.  If you’re a discerning viewer, you can find some great stuff out there.

But here’s the thing.  Time is a finite resource.  We’re all going to run out of it eventually.  My problem is not so much finding enough time to write, though I can always do better.  My problem is that with a day job and two young children, it’s tough finding the time to read. And television, as good as it can be on its best days, is not reading.  If you want to write teleplays, watch scripted television.  If you want to write screenplays, watch movies.  If you want to write short stories and novels, you must read short stories and novels.  No way around it.

So my point is to set priorities.   Giving up something bad for you, as hard as that is, is much easier than giving up something that’s good for you.  Because, you know, consuming more story, in whatever form, can’t hurt.

However, if you’re not finding enough time to write or read, you might have to give up something else to find it.  Television is a great place to start.

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

A noted writer — I think it was Harlan Ellison — once wrote that a writer either heard the music or they didn’t.  If they didn’t hear the music, they were better off quitting and trying their hand at some profession which bettered suited their skills.

I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I knew exactly what he was talking about as soon as I read it.  For me, one of the great joys of being a writer is that occasionally — not all the time, and sometimes not even for great gaps of thousands of words — I get to hear the music.  There is a rhythm behind the words, a pulse behind the prose.  Rarely I hear it for the length of a short story; more often I only get a glimmer of it in a single paragraph.  It’s that moment when the hairs on the back of your neck rise, when you feel that you have created something larger than the sum of its parts.  It’s not mere words.  There’s something more there.

Honestly, it’s the reason I write.

What is the music when it comes to writing?  It is voice, syntax, word choice, story — it is all of these things and more.  The prose can be rich and textured like the best of James Lee Burke; it can also be terse and spartan like Hemmingway at his finest.  Both hear the music.

Stop by any bookstore, pick out a book at random, and chances are that the writer won’t have heard the music.  Chances are that the writing is merely servicable, that at its best it operates as an unimpeding gateway to the story; at its worst, the writing is clunky and distracting, but the story strong enough to cary the day.  And that’s all right.  Most readers read for story.  The story is the thing.  The writing usually just has to be good enough.

But a writer who can tell a great story and hears the music — ah, that’s a special writer indeed.  Those are the books that stand a far greater chance of indelibly imprinting themselves on the reader’s mind long after all other books fade into the darkness.

All of this is a prelude to today’s game.  Honestly, I’m not sure this can be taught.  I’m not even sure it can be learned.  But if it can be learned, then here’s a good way to do it:

Type other writers’ words.

When you read a passage in some work you really admire, one that really speaks to you, type that passage into your word processor.  Study it.  Soak up the rhythms and the word choices.  There’s no substitute for running millions of your own words through your fingers, but this is one way to help.  All you need in your own writing are a few notes.  A couple of beats.  Once you’ve heard it, you’ll know it’s there, and then you can begin the lifelong pursuit of stretching and expanding the music — to giving life to those limp sentences, to putting the soul behind your stories, to reaching and striving for something that, however brief, will sustain you during all those long hours of lonely struggle.

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

This game works best if you’re a short story writer, but it could work well if you’re a non-fiction essay writer as well.  The idea is simple:

Find a published anthology and write a story for it.

You’re basically pretending an editor has contacted you and requested you write a story for the book.  What I like to do is head over to Amazon.com and search specifically for anthologies.  I’ll pick one and use the anthology description as my starting point.

Now you might be thinking, hold on a minute, if the anthology is published, then what chance do I have of getting into it?  Well, of course you can’t get into that book, but trust me, there’s lots of other potential markets for your story.  I find that this idea actually works best when I haven’t read the stories in the anthology — I’m less likely to be influenced by the other writers — but I certainly encourage you to buy the book when you’re finished.  And it might be fun to see how the other writers approached the same idea differently.

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One manuscript page — a double-spaced page with 12 point font — averages out to about 250 words.  Most writers, once they get moving, can write 250 words in 10-20 minutes.  Here’s the other amazing fact:

One page a day = one book a year.

That’s 365 pages.  Or 90,000 words.  All with only twenty minutes a day.

Whenever I’ve let myself get discouraged by how long it takes to write a book, or how little time I seem to have during the day to write, I remind myself of this fact.  Surely I can find 20 minutes somewhere during my day.

And heck, if you’re writing for forty minutes, you’re writing two books a year and considered incredibly proflic by most of the world.

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Your trusty dictionary isn’t just a great resource for spelling and word definitions.  It can be a tool for helping you generate new story ideas.  I call this technique “Dictionary Diving.”

Here’s how it works:  Get a good, thick dictionary, one of the better ones, and then close your eyes, flip through the pages, stop randomly, and choose the closest noun to your finger.  Write it down.  Do it a second time.  Now take those two words and turn it into the first sentence of a new story.  Make it provocative, the kind of sentence that raises questions and makes the reader want to know more.  Then write one page to see where the story takes you.

Now, if the story doesn’t speak for you, fine, toss it aside.  It was just a page.  You can always do it a second time.  Here’s my two words.

• Ghetto
• Scavenger

And just for fun, here’s my first sentence:

The ash cloud moved into the ghetto over night, and all the scavengers hid in the abandoned cars with the windows rolled up so their eyes wouldn’t sting.

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