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.