Writing games are tricks, exercises, things to try to get your writing brain in the mood. I find them useful when a story's giving me trouble - I can't think of a way out of the corner, or I can't think of a corner to get into, or I'm just not feeling in the right mood to write that story - as well as generating new ideas, and just keeping my writing-mind in shape. And on the plus side, they're usually fun to try, and you can end up with the germs of some great little stories.

Whose line is it anyway?

This is best played with a group of four or five, but it's doable by yourself with a little adjustment. The idea is to write a story, one line each. Except you only get to see the line immediately before yours. So, with a group of four people - A, B, C and D:

• A writes the first line.
• B reads A's line, and writes the second line.
• C read's B's line but can't read A's, and writes the third line.
• D reads C's line, but not B's or A's, and writes the fourth.
• A takes it back, reads D's line, but not he first four, and writes the fifth, etc.

With groups beyond five or six, there are too many different minds and ideas, and you tend to get surrealism - it's fun, but it's not going to make sense at all. It can be fun to have a theme, a central idea, or for each person to have an object they have to work in to their line - there are a lot of variations that I should probably save for another post.

You can do this over email, or in a writing group - I wrote a couple of short stories with a friend over email this way - one sentence each at a time. If it's in a face-to-face group, it's often best to run several at once, so people don't get bored waiting for their turn.

Alternatives:

Same concept, but you're writing the story backwards - A writes the last line, B writes the line before that, etc. Kind of a blend between this and Working Backwards.

If you don't have people to write with, you can play this yourself - write one sentence a day, and only allow yourself to look at the previous sentence. If you're a pen-and-paper person, you can do this by using looseleaf that you fold down as you go to hide the previous lines, if you work on computer, you can write it backwards - open the file, and your most recent line is at the start. Insert a page break, and write today's line. Next day, open it, and yesterday's line's at the top; insert a page break again, and write the next line. You'll have to swap it back around when you're done, though.

• Add New
• Search
• RSS

Comments (0)

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2