I thought I was writing a story about a commuter. Turns out I was writing about an alien

Hi everybody. I’d like to apologise for the huge gap between this blog post and the last. I’ve spent the last four weeks interning at Simon and Schuster and commuting to London every day tends to take up a lot of your time. Unfortunately, I’ve got some holidays coming up so my blog posts may continue to be quite erratic over the next couple of months, but I’ll try to write as much as I can.

Today’s blog post was inspired by a friend of mine. I met up with him in London while I was interning and, like the typical writers we are, we went to The Dickens Inn at St Katharine’s Docks and played a writing game. Did you ever play that game when you were a kid where you’d write a sentence of a story and your friend would carry it on and you’d keep swapping every other sentence? I did. My sister and I had a two way black board that we’d write stories on and keep walking around the blackboard, adding to each other’s stories until the whole black board was full.

Well, my friend and I played this game while sitting by the docks and we realised that, aside from being fun, it is a great way to generate ideas.

Depending on who you’re playing with, this game really makes you think on your toes. I started our story with the line ‘It was hot so, naturally, the city smelled like coffee and sun cream’. I was imagining a character like myself, catching the tube through London to get to her job on a hot summer day surrounded by tourists and professionals. The next line of our story revealed that, actually, our protagonist was an alien: ‘I was still getting used to it even though I’d been on earth for the last 27 planetary rotations’.

This game constantly forces you to come up with new ideas. Every idea that starts forming in your head while you’re writing will be completely re-written in the next line. You could come up with 10 different story ideas whilst writing the first 10 lines of the story.

I appreciate that this isn’t exactly ground-breaking advice. This is a game that all of you have probably played at least once in your life. But if you stop looking at it as a silly game and start looking at it as an idea generation exercise, it can actually turn out to be very useful. So don’t dismiss it and, next time you meet up with a fellow writer, give it a try!

Thanks for reading