Literary games for the festive season by Tracy Darnton

Christmas jumper? Check! Tin of Quality Street? Check! Captive audience? Check!

It’s literary games time! I come from a family that plays games. Big time. I could open a board game café with all the ones in the cupboard. And at Christmas time I can make even more people join in because it’s my house and they’re trapped here for the festive season. So here are my suggestions:

Quiz! The papers are full of these as Christmas approaches. I like The Guardian Review Literary Quiz and The Telegraph does a good one too. Previous years are available online so try this Art and Literature quiz for kids from The Telegraph and this Fantasy Teen quiz in The Guardian.

The book tokens hidden clues game. Every Christmas, the book token people produce a picture rammed with references to twenty book titles. Some are obvious - settings like Gilead and Darkest Peru on a signpost for instance - but others require more lateral thinking like 'extremely angry vineyard'. Previous years puzzles are on the site along with a simpler version for kids. Check it out at: Hidden Clues 

The Great Penguin Bookchase

I bought this at the Hay festival many years ago and it’s basically trivial pursuit but much harder and slower with usually at least one visitor disappointed that no actual penguins feature. The kids groan when I get this one out but don’t be deterred because, look, you collect little books for your little bookshelf! How cute is that!

Story consequences – pen and paper.

First fold – Once upon a time there was a ...

Second fold - who wanted to ...

Third fold - But ...

Fourth fold - So he/she ...

Fifth fold - And in the end …

Who am I?

We play this on the Folly Farm winter retreat and it works well for large groups. Split into two teams. Everyone secretly writes down at least four authors, literary characters or any famous people if you want to widen it out, on slips of paper which are folded and placed in a bowl/Christmas stocking.

Each team takes it in turn with one member having one minute to describe as many of the names on the slips as they can without using the actual words written down. They get a point for each correct one and they can pass once. Carry on until all the slips have been used once. Now it gets trickier. All slips go back into the bowl.

This time you're only allowed to use one word to describe the person/character - though remember that everyone will have heard them described in full once. Carry on until all the slips have been guessed. 

The final round has all the names back in the bowl but this time no words are allowed - only actions. The team with the most points across all three rounds wins.

Don’t forget all the classic word games like Pass the bomb! Taboo! Bananagrams, Boggle, Scrabble and Codewords.  And of course no Christmas games session would be complete without Charades! Books only.

Quick round of Elmer bingo, anyone?

Merry Christmas!

You can follow Tracy on Twitter @TracyDarnton

A Little Light Relief by Claire Fayers

We’re halfway through World Book Month. Halfway through school visits, through travel, admin, preparation and loads of exhausting fun with kids. It’s time we gave ourselves a break and as I’m a keen game player, I thought I’d suggest a few games that should appeal to authors. 

Once Upon a Time

Atlas Games

This classic storytelling game was released in 1994 and it’s still going strong - especially in my house where visitors are routinely compelled to navigate a narrative of evil step-mothers, lost princes and talking frogs.

The players all receive one story ending card and a hand of cards depicting common fairytale elements.

The first player launches into a story ‘Once upon a time…’ The idea is to spin a tale, weaving in all the elements on your cards and ending with your secret ending card. But the other players have their own cards and are waiting to leap in and drag the story off to their own ending. Mention something that’s on one of their cards and they can interrupt and take over the narrative.

The winner is the player who reaches their secret ending, but the real fun lies in telling a good story. The best ones go on and on, taking all sorts of twists and turns as cards are slapped down to interrupt and players tug the narrative back and forth. It helps to have a basic knowledge of fairytales, a quick wit and the ability to improvise.

Gloom

Atlas Games

If the thought of racing multiple storytellers to your own happy ending is too much, you may prefer Gloom. Another storytelling card game, this one is for two to four players, with expansions that will take it up to seven people, and the aim of the game is to make your characters as miserable as possible. And then kill them. 

The cards themselves are semi-transparent, so as you heap tragedy upon tragedy, the earlier modifiers are still visible and their terrible effects can still be felt. I like to play this game with my husband at the end of a long day.

Ex-Libris

Oxford Games

This is a game for any number of book-lovers, though it works best with groups of six or more. The game consists of a set of cards, each on containing a book title, the author, and a brief description of the book.

One player is the librarian, who reads out the title, author and blurb. Each player then writes a suitable first or last line for the book, and the librarian writes the actual line. The librarian collects all lines and reads them out, and everyone votes for which they think is the real one. You score a point for guessing correctly and get a bonus point for anyone who votes for your line. A great way to show off your literary knowledge!

Wordsy
Formal Ferret Games

Only got a few minutes between book events? Wordsy is a quick and elegant word game that you can play on your own, though it will also accommodate up to 6 players, and it takes around 20 minutes to play.

Eight consonant cards are laid out in a grid. The players compete to come up with a word that contains some of those letters. (You’re allowed to use other letters too, though you only score the ones in the grid.)

If you’re playing on your own, the aim is to get the highest score you can. With multiple players, the first player to write down a word flips a timer giving everyone else 30 seconds to decide on their own words. Words are scored according to the position of the letters in the grid plus various bonuses. At the end of seven rounds, you add up your five best-scoring words and see who wins.

You can even play it on twitter @wordsybot

Thanks to my friend and game designer, Rob Harper, for suggesting this one!

That's it from me. I'm off to prepare for my next set of author events. I hope all your school visits go well this month.

The Secret Manuscript – by Ruth Hatfield

Hands up – who’s got a secret manuscript? No, I don’t mean that novel you’ve had half-written for years in a drawer, waiting for the perfect ending or the will to finish. I mean the real secret manuscript, the one that you delight in writing – maybe even taking time away from your ‘proper’ writing to write – into which you throw all your worst clichés and ham-fisted phrases, your most stereotypical and devastating characters, your wildest dreams and your uber-wildest dreams. That manuscript: the one you’re never going to show to ANYONE, EVER. In fact it’s possibly the only Word file on your computer which is password protected with the name of your most embarrassing crush.

Naively, it didn’t really occur to me until quite recently that the secret manuscript must be a common thing. But the more I think about it, the more I realise that a lot of us must have one. In my recent break from writing to do a bit of archaeology work, I took my current Work In Progress abroad with me, sure that I would get round to some editing in the evenings. I didn’t.

What I did instead was write my secret manuscript. I’m not, of course, going to tell you anything about it – honestly, you probably can’t imagine how ridiculous and derivative and devastatingly fantastic it is. But I did confess to a fellow writer that I was letting myself write a whole story that purposefully isn’t for public display. Or any display at all, in fact. And my correspondent didn’t think that was at all strange. She referred to it as playing, and noted wisely that we should all give ourselves time to play.

We talk a lot about playing in writing, and I tend to assume we mean playing games – mostly structured games, with some actual purpose. Word games. Imagination games. Little challenges designed to open up our minds and help us learn how to navigate our ways around the realms of our subconscious. I guess I was thinking of playing as being a preliminary stage in the actual writing of actual stories.

But my secret manuscript isn’t that at all. It’s an end in itself. It’s pure lazy pleasure. The writing is purposefully outrageous and horrible. The characters are anything I want them to be. If I want them to be different, they change immediately. If I can’t be bothered to write a bit, I don’t write it. If I want them to break off what they’re doing and have an in-depth discussion of what causes bone splints in horses, then that’s what they’ll discuss.

And oddly, for something so self-indulgent, my interest in the secret manuscript wanes and waxes. It reached absolute fever pitch while I was away, to the extent that for a week or so I wrote about 3,000 words a day, in the time when I should have been taking an afternoon nap. It’s sort of faded away, now, although I’m sure it’ll be back.

So what was it was all for, that frenzy of imagining, of writing? The answers are simple. It was for fun. It was to remind me that I can be so excited about a story that I don’t want to talk to anyone, don’t want to think about anything else. It was to remind me that in the realm of my imagination, anything can happen, and it doesn’t have to make sense or be realistic or only use one adjective where seven will do perfectly well.

The secret manuscript is having a well-deserved sleep, just now, and I feel much happier about turning back to my real Work In Progress. Because I think the best thing the secret manuscript reminded me of is that I started this writing lark because I enjoyed it, and because my imagination was a place in which I could roam free. It still is that, and it always will be. So the editing I’m currently doing can’t be that hard, or that bad, can it? I’m only editing a story I wrote because I wanted to write it, and it came from a place I controlled, and was happy in. It can’t be as awful a task as I became convinced it was.

Although saying that does remind me that perhaps the best joy of all is that the secret manuscript will never have to be edited. Those adjective strings will stay, the bone splints will stay, the absurd and the heroic and the irredeemably impossible will stay. It feels like a very dirty, guilty, horrific, wonderful, glorious, marvellous, time-wasting secret, except I’m 99% certain that most of you will know exactly what I’m talking about…

Games to overcome writer's block – David Thorpe

People often ask how to become a writer. It's too easy to respond: "just write". 

The idea of sitting down at blank screen or piece of paper is terrifying for someone not used to it. Partly that's why people go on writing courses: to be given exercises.

But even people on writing courses still find it difficult to write. There are too many psychological blocks.

For hopelessly addicted writers like myself it's often hard to remember what these blocks are, because we write almost all the time – even in our heads or when asleep, and when we are pretending not to be thinking about our latest plot problem in company because it's not really polite to let the people you are with know that you are not giving them the fullest attention.

Perhaps not being able to get writing even though you want to is like knowing that you need to exercise but finding it hard to get out of your chair and go for that walk.

It's not just the effort, it's actually scary.

And although the scary things are just in your head, that doesn't make them any less tough to handle.

What could be the way around this?

I suggest: to let a different part of your mind take over. 

Let us play

There is some considerable crossover between writing and playing.

Playing is what children do without even trying, without thinking about it, completely sublimely and unconsciously.

Give a child a couple of figurines or dolls and they will be making them interact, giving them lines to speak to each other and things to do before your back is turned.

Introduce two children who do not know each other and within minutes they will be playing.

The point about play is that you can't make a mistake. There is nothing at stake. You have nothing to lose. And it is fun.

Unfortunately as we become adults many of us forget how to play. In some cases perhaps that's why we drink alcohol or take other substances: to loosen our minds up.

Just as habitual athletes are used to flexing their muscles, so habitual writers are used to loosening their minds.

But beginner writers need to trick their minds into becoming loose. If you can't directly give yourself permission, you can do it in a roundabout way.

The beginner athlete isn't going for a walk, they are walking the dog. They aren't going for a cycle ride, they are cycling to the shop because they need some milk.

If you are a student of impro comedy then you will play games as part of your training, because you absolutely need a loose mind to stand up on a stage in front of an audience and be spontaneously silly.

Writers can borrow some of these games.

And there are ones for coming up with characters. Like:

Interview yourself in character

Take some names at random: two forenames and one surname. Now interview this person in the manner of a magazine article. What changed their life? What is their favourite cheese? Do they believe in God and if so what colour is God?

If you can't think of any questions yourself, just use ones from an existing magazine interview.

If you invent two characters this way, next write a short scene in which they meet each other. Try having the meet each other in unusual situations: a car crash, a funeral, arguing over who is next to be served in a crowded bar, in a spaceship due to be stranded on a strange planet.

Or this one: imagine a friend of yours in a different time and place, say gangster-ruled Chicago in the 1930s, or a country house in the time of Jane Austen. Give them a different name and have them meet another friend or relative of yours, also given a different name but the same personality.  What happens next?

Give them a reason for meeting: to arrange a marriage or a business deal. Or maybe they are in love with the same person or want to get their hands on the same stash of money or guns. What's the first thing they say? Or do?

Once you've started, write the first thing that comes into your head. Don't pause, don't analyse. Children don't analyse when they play.

Keep going, don't try to come up with anything better, just let it flow. If you stop, write the last thing you wrote again, and keep going.

Other games

Then there is guided meditation. Close your eyes. Imagine yourself going on a journey – to another place. Picture what you see and who you meet.

You have to go through a door. What is it like? Who or what is on the other side?

Stay in the trance state, open your eyes and write it down.

Or use a device to record you saying what you see and transcribe it later.

There are other games – for writing poetry for instance. See these ones compiled by Tim Wynne-Jones.

As soon as you do any of these things you are tricking your mind into playing. You are giving yourself permission to be a writer.

You are writing. And that's what writers do.

Have fun!