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I’m working on building up my resource of writing games, but for now, check out my current collection.
The point of writing games is to help jump-start your thinking, to get the pen moving, and to let you have fun. For some people, this is actually the easiest way to start writing.
If you know of other games that would make a great addition to the collection, feel free to share them!
Posted by Rebecca as Writing Games at 12:12 PM EST
I haven’t had time to be social during NaNoWriMo this year, but there is a great game we’ve played the past couple of years that helped relax the group about writing (and it’s turned out to be better than a book of Mad Libs!)
You’re familiar with the concept of the Writing Round Robin, right? You set a time limit, say two minutes, and everyone starts a story. Once the time limit is up, the papers all move one writer to the left, the timer is reset, and everyone adds to the story they’ve been handed.
The benefit, and a bit of a time-hog, is that you can see wht you’re adding to and then it’s up to you to decide whether to ocntinue the story as is, or to give it a funky plot twist.
The game we like to play takes the Round Robin and makes it a bit more interesting. One person starts off by writing two sentences. They then fold back the paper so that only the end of the second sentence is showing. They hand the folded paper to the next person, who adds two sentences and folds back the paper. It continues this way until everyone is tired of adding sentences or you run out of paper.
One person then reads that story, much to the roaring laughter of the rest of the group.
It’s fun, it’s easy. It gets you thinking. Give it a try at your next writing group.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 8:32 AM EST
from Cass:
I’m sure most of the folks here have heard this one:
“There are three rules to novel writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”
At our kick-off party, I handed my Wrimos some index cards and told them to each come up with their three rules for novelling. Then I mixed up the index cards and had everybody read them aloud. It was a hoot! Some of the rules were practical, some of them quirky, some of them downright silly, but we had a great variety of them, and everybody really enjoyed this activity. It’s a simple, cheap, and fun ice-breaker.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 9:38 PM EST
I love being able to swipe things from fellow WriMos!
BERaven and NewMexicoKid are giving out NaNoWriMo hispter PDA’s as goodies for our flock. These are bound sets of 3×5 index cards (some empty, others filled with writing tips and tools). I was thinking it would be cool to use 3×5 index cards in an ice-breaking event as a neat tie-in.
So here is the ice-breaker idea (comments and suggestions for improving this are very welcome):
1. hand out two index cards and a pencil to each participant
2. everyone writes down a paragraph on each card. One card will have a story snippet from that person’s life but without using any names. The other card will have a similar story segment summary from a favorite novel.
3. when everyone is finished writing, the cards are mixed up and then handed out to the participants. People take turns reading the cards one by one to the group.
4. Group members try to decide if what is read is fact or fiction. If it is fact, they can try for extra credit to try to guess who the card belongs to. Of course, one cannot guess one’s own card.
Haven’t thought about what the winner gets… perhaps I’ll make an extension pack for the hipster PDA cards…
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 9:38 PM EST
Cut 4×6 index cards in the middle, so you have 4×3 inch cards.
Cut as many as you need for each player to have 5 cards.
Hand out 5 blank cards to each player.
Each player is to fill in each card.
On one card the heading is Character. They give a short one line character discription. (IE: Woman with 1000 tattoos)
On second card the heading is Obstacle. They give a short one line obstacle. (IE: out of ammo!)
The third card heading is Plot. They give a short one line plot. (IE: save the world!)
Fourth card heading is End. They give a short one line resolution or end. (IE: Lover concers all)
The fifth card doesn’t get a heading, but has a short one line discription that can be of any type of the above.
Have someone collect all the character cards, someone else the plot, etc, keeping the heading cards in different stacks.
So once all the cards are back, you have 5 seperate stacks. Shuffle each stack.
pass out 1 card from each stack, except the ‘no headers’, which are kept back. So, each player gets 1 character card, 1 obstical card, 1 plot card and 1 end cards.
They look at what they have. They can trade in ONE card. Those who want to trade in a card, put their card in the ‘discard’ pile in the middle of the table. They are given 1 card from the ‘no header’ deck.
Give them 5 minutes to look at their cards and come up with a story that matches the prompts.
Going from dealers left, each person tells the story that their cards prompted. Put a time frame on how long the story can be.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 9:38 PM EST
With NaNoWriMo winding down quixkly, I wanted somewhere to store a lot of the neat games and ideas I’ve been seeing on the off chance I might want to be a Municipal Liaison ever again. The idea is that each will get its own post, and I’ll kick Rebecca to get her to add in categories so these are more easily located.
The first is a game called 1000 Blank Cards. Good concept. Simple. Definitely worth checking out sometime.
Posted by Ceara as Writing Games at 9:38 PM EST