I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

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.

Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers

Tongue twisters are fantastic comedy devices when used well. There's a particular episode of the old cartoon Pinky and the Brain that shows the sheer cleverness and joy to be found in finding tongue-twisting ways of saying perfectly ordinary things. It's available on youtube - go watch, I'll wait.

Now that you know what I'm talking about - the writing exercise is to create your own version of this. Take some kind of set up with several components (in the above example, we have the sheet slitters, the sock pluckers and sack pickers, as well as the buggy bumpers and the toy boat) and reinvent names for them that repeat syllables with minor variations, then create your skit.

There's a particular English class that almost every student for the past ten (twelve? twenty?) years has gone through. It happens usually around year seven or eight, when English teachers are trying to stretch students' vocabularies and teach them to think about what they're writing, rather than just plonking words on the page. It's a class that I (and a lot of other writers my age) remember vividly, now with anger, for the sheer amount of effort it's taken me to unlearn what I was taught then.

It's the class where they teach you that 'said' is an evil word.

You spend weeks writing little stories where characters will smirk, glare, grimace, giggle, stutter, yelp, flinch and gulp their way through conversation, entirely oblivious to the fact that out those verbs, only one is actually possible as an act of speech.

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.

Three's a crowd

What's to the left of you, right now? Some paperwork? Your coffee? A plaster wall? Whatever it is, that's your topic. You're going to write at least three people having an argument (or a general discussion, but arguments tend to be easier, and more fun) about that topic. The paperwork isn't done. The coffee-pot is never refilled, or it's always refilled with the wrong coffee. The plaster needs to be painted blue, not yellow. Three people are about to have a flaming row over this, but that's the easy bit.

The trick is - you're not allowed to use any speech tags. No 'said', 'muttered', 'yelled', 'replied', 'screamed', 'snorted' or 'expostulated'. Nothing. You have to indicate who is speaking just using grammatical indicators (a new person speaking or acting starts a new line) and speech mannerisms - what they say, and how they say it. And you'll need to do this - two people in an argument can take turns. Three people can't. So you'll need to construct things very carefully to make it clear who's speaking.

Make the argument a silly, vindictive or vicious as you like, and feel free to let the topic ramble, or have people dredge up past grievances as ammunition. You just can't use speech tags.

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.

Eavesdropping

You need to be somewhere where either people make phone calls, or people have conversations but it's noisy enough that you can only hear one side. Train stations, airports, cafes, office cubicles, supermarkets and the foyer of expensive restaurants usually work. Each place will often have its own 'tone' of conversation, too, so try a variety of places with this one.

The first step is simple, albeit not particularly polite - listen in on someone's phone conversation, or one person's side of a face-to-face conversation, and note it down. Write down everything they say, as close to verbatim as possible. If you can do shorthand, so much the better.

You'll need to be reasonably circumspect - as a general rule, people don't like you recording their conversations, and in some places it may even be illegal, even though you're not intending anything harmful with it. Be careful. If they walk out of earshot and you haven't got much, don't follow them (unless it's really easy to do so inconspicuously, like at a train station). You can take snippets of several people's conversation and glue them together for much the same result.

Once you have your conversation, sit down and examine what they're saying. Forget trying to figure out what they actually were talking about - now it's time to imagine what they could have been discussing. Secret spy code-words, clandestine liasons, illicit business deals, broken hearts, new love, old arguments - whatever triggers your imagination. Feel free to make it a conference call, if need be - two, three, four other people on the line, butting in. The only rule is you can't change the speech you've recorded - that's what was said. Though it wasn't necessarily all said by the same person, if that works better for you.

Now write the scene of that conversation. They don't have to be on the phone, they could be in a living room together or on opposite sides of the galaxy with half a year between each sentence as the message travels across space. Write not just the dialogue, but the whole scene of that conversation - what they're doing, feeling, seeing, touching, smelling. See where it goes.