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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 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

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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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

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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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