Behind the Stacks is a new weekly thread post for readers of In A Brown Study. Imagine we have a secret cozy room tucked away in the study where we can gather, talk amongst ourselves, and talk about the things we truly want to talk about without worrying about word limits or voices being lost.
Yes! Games! I hadn’t even thought of doing such a thing until last year when someone on my Twitter feed shared Fun and (Writing) Games Salon with authors Alethea Kontis and K. Tempest Bradford.
I am alas not part of their Patreon at the moment (because Budget), but did take a workshop last year with them and was completely inspired. It helped me realize sometimes you need to just write and not think about posting or publishing. Just writing for the love of it. That’s it.
Do y’all have any exercises or games that you do with your writing? I’ll share some of mine!
One of my favorite writing games to play is Oracle Freewriting. I have a handful of oracle decks that I use for divination but also double as writing prompts. I shuffle the cards, pull three. One for the theme, one for a character trait, one for scene setting. When I'm not feeling overly ambitious, I just pull one and freewrite whatever comes to mind.
Another one I do Photo Writing. Either pick a number 1 - 30 in my head and whatever picture I land on with that number is the photo prompt. Another way is ask my sister via text to pick a number lol.
I would love to find more games and exercises for writing! Ones you made up, ones you heard of, or took classes one (as long as the hosts said it was okay!).
This one is, again, from like sixteen years ago when I was co-moderating the Flint Michigan Nanowrimo community -- we'd meet up somewhere with a cafe, outlets, and wifi, and write through the power of positive peer pressure. A game we played that my co-mod made up was that we all wrote something on a 3x5 card (literally anything, but it had to be PG since we had some kids who were participating) and then we all drew a card and had to commit to putting whatever was on it into our current nano writing. I was writing high fantasy and ended up with an entire chapter devoted to a little person who was both a wizard and a clown, if I remember correctly. If I ever locate my novel draft, I will be legitimately sad if I have to cut the chapter he's in, lol, because he was more interesting than most of my other characters at the time.
One of my favorite writing games to play is Oracle Freewriting. I have a handful of oracle decks that I use for divination but also double as writing prompts. I shuffle the cards, pull three. One for the theme, one for a character trait, one for scene setting. When I'm not feeling overly ambitious, I just pull one and freewrite whatever comes to mind.
Another one I do Photo Writing. Either pick a number 1 - 30 in my head and whatever picture I land on with that number is the photo prompt. Another way is ask my sister via text to pick a number lol.
I would love to find more games and exercises for writing! Ones you made up, ones you heard of, or took classes one (as long as the hosts said it was okay!).
This one is, again, from like sixteen years ago when I was co-moderating the Flint Michigan Nanowrimo community -- we'd meet up somewhere with a cafe, outlets, and wifi, and write through the power of positive peer pressure. A game we played that my co-mod made up was that we all wrote something on a 3x5 card (literally anything, but it had to be PG since we had some kids who were participating) and then we all drew a card and had to commit to putting whatever was on it into our current nano writing. I was writing high fantasy and ended up with an entire chapter devoted to a little person who was both a wizard and a clown, if I remember correctly. If I ever locate my novel draft, I will be legitimately sad if I have to cut the chapter he's in, lol, because he was more interesting than most of my other characters at the time.
This sounds so fun