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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If you’re like me, there’s times when you sit down at the keyboard and every idea that comes to you seems hackneyed.  The well has run dry.  You can’t seem to think of an original idea.

Well, therein lies the problem, this tendency that writers have that everything must be original, and that everything they write should be autographed and framed on the wall. Sometimes you have to plow through thousands of words of practice before the original idea — the one that really gets you excited — emerges.

Here’s a technique I’ve used all the time just to get the fingers moving:  Set your countdown timer to five minutes and write as many words as you can in that time.  Don’t stop.  Don’t judge.  Just keep typing until the timer goes off.  Then add up the words.  If you like this technique, keep a running total of how many words you’ve written at each session. *

Now, you might be thinking, well, I could just type random words, but I dare you to try it.  Our minds actually want to create order out of chaos.  You might be surprised at where your typing takes you.  If you’re pushing yourself to write fast — remember, don’t judge, just keeping pushing, the focus is on the number of words and not on the quality — you’re out-racing the critical side of your brain, the side that censors things for being “too weird.”  But when I’ve used this technique, often those “too weird” ideas are the ones I’ve been able to turn into something I had a blast writing — and usually sold too.

The worst that can happen?  Even if you don’t find anything in your free write you want to use, you spent five minutes — a whopping five minutes — warming up your fingers and shaking the cobwebs out of your brain.  That’s valuable all by itself.

* Note:  If you use Microsoft Word, you can click on File, then Properties to get the word count of your document.

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As far as publications go, this Spring is the biggest one yet:  Last month, I published two story collections – The Dinosaur Diaries, as well as A Web of Black Widows — and here in a little over a week my first novel is coming out from Simon and Schuster.  For the most part, The Last Great Getaway of the Water Balloon Boys, is garnering great reviews (Publisher’s Weekly called it a “touching and impressive debut novel”), so I’m hoping sales are good as well.  Early next month, I’m having my official book launch event in my hometown.  Lots happening.  And if you plan to buy the book, please preorder and buy in the first few weeks.  Those early sales numbers encourage bookstores to stock more copies, which helps an author’s career.

There’s some things percolating on the writing front, some things that could be potentially very good, but I can’t talk about them yet.  Regardless, I have this sense that my writing career is shifting into its next phase.  What that phase ultimately looks like remains to be seen, but the shift is happening, I think.

It’s also caused me to do a lot of thinking about exactly what my career goals are as a writer.  Up until now, I’ve pretty much just gone by the seat of my pants, my philosophy that I would just keep trying different types of books to see what sticks.  And because my writing is just like my reading — eclectic — this plays to my strengths.  I just write what I want to write and let the chips fall where they may.

And while I may always be a little that way (it’s just who I am), I also want to give myself the best chance at reaching the widest audience possible.  This might mean being a little more careful about what I write and why.  It might mean thinking about the potential audience a little more, as well as how commercial and marketable a particular concept is.  Up until this point, I’ve pretty much refrained from letting the marketing and business side into my creative space, but lately I’ve been challenging that assumption.  And that’s okay.  I think I’m finally at a point where I can do this in a way that augments my creativity rather than hinders it.

It’s a very subtle shift in the way I’m approaching the craft, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a significant one.  I’m also more willing to allow people into the early stages of the creative process to help me gage these factors.  This is the biggest gamble for me, but there’s some things that have happened lately — and we should see in the near future how these things pan out — that give me hope I’m finally at a point that I can do this without jeopardizing my confidence.  I never would have attempted some of these things ten years ago, and I would seldom if ever recommend that beginning writers do anything but just write what they feel passionate about and finish it before showing it to anybody.

But becoming successful at anything involves some amount of risk, and it’s not just in the product.  It can also involve your methods.  I’m starting to take more risks with my methods right now.  We’ll see how it pans out.

“You can’t wait for inspiration.  You have to go after it with a club.” — Jack London

If you’re sitting around waiting for the perfect idea to pop into your head before you put a word on the page, you’re going to be waiting a long time.  Usually you never know when an idea is great anyway — it just happens along the way.  And even when you’re finished, you may think the end product is terrible, but your own opinion is often distorted because you’re comparing your work to some impossible ideal and not really seeing the true merits of what’s on the page.

Anyway, ideas are easy.  It’s what you do with those ideas that makes great writing.

Still, there are times when the ideas just won’t flow.  Here’s a neat game that can give you a jolt: Use a dice and a grid with story possibilities to create the bones of a new story.

This is geared toward fiction, but you could certainly adapt it to nonfiction.  For fiction, the bones of every story can generally be boiled down to a character in a setting with a problem.

A hobbit named Frodo [C] journeys across the ancient land of Middle Earth [S] to destroy the One Ring before the evil Sauron finds him [P].

In fact, you can boil almost every scene down to those essentials too.

Indiana Jones [C] races through a deadly cave [S] to avoid from getting crushed by a giant boulder [P].

To play this game, create a 3 x 6 grid.  The three columns along the top should be labeled “Character,” “Setting,” and “Problem.”  Number the six rows on the left.  Now it’s time to do some brainstorming.  You need to come up with six characters, six settings, and six problems.  Be creative!  Here’s an example:

The next step is to roll the dice three times.  The first number chooses the character.  The second number chooses the setting.  The third chooses the problem.  Once you’ve got those, start your story and see where it goes.  Here’s a tip:  Don’t be too constrained.  If the story takes you in a different direction, go with it.

So let’s say I rolled a “3,” a “1″ and a “6.”  That would give me a lead singer in a hit band who’s in an elevator and must pay off a bet to a mafia man.  My mind is already rolling . . .

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Although I get a much stronger charge out of reading great writing, I have to admit that I get a little boost out of reading bad writing too — that is, bad writing that’s made its way into print by a major publisher.

Now, I’m not going to name any names, because again, this is subjective, but just about every writer has had the experience of reading something and at some point along the way (because often you don’t even manage to finish it) you say to yourself, “How did that get published?”

And you think to yourself, “Hey, if someone was willing to publish that, then I can certainly do it too.”

If you’re always comparing yourself to the masters, and you become aware of how big the gulf is between your level of craft and theirs, it’s easy to get discouraged.  But when you realize that the bar to getting published — and even getting widely read — is not that high, it can help sustain you during those discouraging moments.  It doesn’t even have to be bad.  Mediocre is probably a better word.

So don’t throw that bad novel in the garbage.  Keep it.  And when you’re feeling discouraged, pull it out and remind yourself that your writing doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.

The caveat, of course, is to make sure you’re still reaching for greatness.

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It never fails.  Whenever I find my creative well running  dry, I get a charge out of reading great writing.

Of course, great writing is subjective, so what I find great will be different than what you find great.  But almost all writers can name a couple of influential books that inspired them along the way, books that made them want to write something equally as good.  I’m not talking works by Shakespeare or Joyce or Chaucer either, although it certainly could be.  I’m talking about books that made you fall in love with reading — Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice . . .

It’s even better when it’s a modern book, one written in a style that’s still popular.  Maybe it’s an author you really admire.  For me, Stephen King is one of the first writers I grab, because he writes with the kind of engaging voice and clear style that I’m reaching for in my own writing.

So here’s the game in a nutshell:   If you need a creative boost, grab one of your favorite books and turn to one of your favorite passages.  Read it aloud.  It won’t be long before you feel that creative impulse return, the impulse that says, “I want to write something as good as that.”

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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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I’m about to run out to the Oregon coast for a three-day writing workshop — a fun opportunity to talk shop with lots of other writers, something I don’t get to do nearly often enough — but I wanted to share this link before I go.

On Monday, Fantasy Magazine, published my collaboration with Ray Vukcevich, “A Stray.” You can read it for free online.

Well, today they’ve published an interview with Ray and I about the collaborative process.  We even included a couple of our email exchanges at the end, which you might find interesting.  I also agree with Ray’s comment that when two people collaborate, then a third person emerges, which was certainly true in this case.  A lot more planning and pre-writing went into this story than is usually the case for me — usually this sort of thing happens more in my head, and even then more on a gut level.  I believe Ray was saying the same was true for him.

But going back and forth about the story via email, shaping it and molding it a bit before setting a word on the page — that was a very valuable experience.  You might find some of our notes interesting too, especially if you read the story, because it shows where we made decisions about the direction the story was going.

Whether those decisions worked or not, well, that’s up to each reader to decide.