I want to share a cool thing I’ve been doing for the past year or so.
About once a month, I get together with my partner and a few like-minded friends. We’ve met in the park and at each other’s homes. We bring snacks (fruit, cheese, and cured meats are always a safe bet) and drinks (tea, seltzer water). We chat for a while and catch up.
Then, we go to this site and generate ten random words. Any similar site will do fine. We all look over the list, and pick two words that jointly make for an inspiring theme. We set an hour timer, and we all hunker down on our laptops or phones and write a short story based (often loosely) on that theme.
When we’re done (we usually extend the timer 5-10 minutes so everyone can wrap up), we take turns reading our stories aloud to everyone. They’re usually between 800 and 1500 words. Everyone is very sweet and affirming to each other’s stories. This definitely isn't a hardcore writers’ workshop where we’re criticizing each other’s off-the-cuff pieces; it’s a purely nice, positive thing.
I’ve really enjoyed this process. I don’t love all the stories I’ve come up with, but I always have fun writing and sharing them. It’s nice to do something creative without worrying about whether the end product will be worth making a whole itch page, posting it on social media.
I’ve really liked a few of the stories. I’ve thought about making a little PDF collection and posting them on itch. But then I started overthinking things. How many stories should I include? Are any of them really worth sharing?
I decided to table the collection idea for now. I’ll just keep writing little stories, enjoying the process, and maybe sharing the ones I really like in smaller circles.
I want to keep working like this, both socially and on my own. It’s helping me grow as a writer. When I improvise and slam out small stories based on ideas I just came up with, it’s easier to see my creative patterns. I see the parts of my prose voice I’m proud of, and I see what story structures and clichés I reach for more than I should.
This isn’t the only way I’ve been experimenting as a writer. At the behest of my partner, I attempted NaNoWriMo last November. (She’s won eight times, incredibly.) We successfully roped in a bunch of friends and family. Everyone had a blast. I successfully won — I wrote 55,000 words and completed a first draft!
I haven’t returned to that draft yet, although I want to once I’m done with a few other mega-projects. Right now, I’m finishing up a large interactive fiction story. I’ve had the seed of it in a google doc for a couple of years now. Over the last three or four months, I’ve gone from barely anything drafted, to a complete, mostly edited 43,000 word twine.
Between flash fiction, my twine, and the NaNoWriMo, I’ve slammed out over 100,000 words of fiction in the last year. I’ve never written at this pace in my life before. I’m not planning to post any of it here (the flash fiction is very casual and loose, and the long-form works *cough* don't really fit the Far Away Times brand). But I’m confident the learning and growing I’m doing with these projects will only make my future stories stronger.
My itch and my blog are going to be a little quiet this year. I made a huge amount of progress early in the year on my big RPGMaker explore-y game. I stalled out because mega-projects are exhausting. But the map is fully built out and polished — I "just" need to do the NPC dialogue, a couple of cutscenes, and the interior locations. I want to get it in playtesters’ hands in the winter, then release it early next year.
I’m still making a Vextro jam entry, so the itch won’t be completely dead in 2024. My hope is that I’ll finish my current mega-projects, then channel more of this flash fiction/writers’ club energy into my game dev. Some of the game designers I most admire have shared over a hundred games over the years. They’re good at giving themselves permission to sketch out small ideas and not overthink them to death. As a result, they’re able to put out a ton of cool, creatively vibrant works.
Next year, I’d like to make more complete games in one or two sittings. I think the way to get better at a creative discipline is to work at it consistently over a long time, to start and finish many, many projects. Learning to work in a looser, sketchier mode sometimes would be good for me.
It’s funny that it’s translating into so little publicly shareable work, but this has maybe been the most creatively productive year of my life. I’m even writing videogame criticism again, over on Backloggd! Even with something as low stakes as games crit, it helps to find a space where you can casually make things without worrying about whether the end result is “good enough.” I intend to repost some of my favorite reviews on here over the next few weeks.
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