Creative Writing Drinking Games

As promised: Alcohol induced literary madness gleaned from the finest corners of the internet!

1. The players in this game stand in a line and each person will say a part of a story. This can be as short as one sentence per person; however, the people in line do not tell their part of the story in the order in which they are standing. Random people in the line randomly declare their thoughts. The goal is to eventually create a story that makes sense, which isn’t always as easy as it may seem. While this game is extremely funny without alcoholic beverages, drinking can be incorporated so that every time someone laughs or fails to connect the elements of the story, he or she is penalized with a drink.

2. A better version of the previous one is where people sit around with pens and paper. The first person writes the start of a story or a poem (usually one or two lines), the next person writes the next bit and folds the top down and passes it on. The paper passes around the circle, each person adding a line then folding down the paper so that no one person sees the full story when they add their bit, only the previous line or two. The stories end up hillarious as the evening moves on and more alcohol has been consumed.

3. Some fun games can be made out of recitations. Say whenever soemone’s poem mention the big themes (love birth sex and death) everyone takes a drink.

4. I’ve never played this one before because I don’t know who Roger Cohen is but I’m sure it could be applied to anyone with equally bad writing

5. This is a list of games to play when reading specific writers.

6. This one sounds pretty difficult but I include it for any hardcore drinkers who can function on this level after a few pints.

7. Finally, the incredibly sophisticated game ‘In my pants’ is good fun when drinking. Typically someone says a song title followed by the phrase ‘in my pants’ looking for the funniest combination (‘Stairway to Heaven in my pants’) but instead of song titles it can be played with book titles (‘Things Fall Apart in my pants’)

Enjoy, remember, never ever drink and write. 😉

Maynooth (Epic) Writers group

So a friend of mine started a writers group in Maynooth recently. We’re hoping to get a blog and a facebook page set up eventually and possibly an online critique system but for the minute I’ll just explain what it is.

Anyone is allowed attend and we critique each others creative writing. You don’t need to be attending the college, no restrictions on age, genre, ability etc. There are other groups in Maynooth but the Literary and Debating society is only for students and we’ve heard of a group that meets in Carton House but is really only for pretty serious published author’s. You don’t even have to be from Maynooth to come, it’s just a convenient, central enough location with lots of free rooms we can use.

All kinds of writing are welcome, from poetry to short stories to novels to screenplays to graphic novels/comics to song lyrics to videogame or rpg scripts… you get the picture

We’ve met twice so far and things have gone well. Bring copies of your writing for people to read (Or you can read aloud) and we each take a turn reading our own stuff, critiquing others and debating issues such as the difficulties of getting published or feminism on the Irish writing scene. We might eventually hold events if we can get any funding, and last time we met up was extremely casual and informal as it was the end of exams for a lot of us so we met in a local pub. I didn’t have time to write anything new but I still got ideas from a few of the people there and I looked several creative Writing drinking games (which I’ll post later).

 

So basically is you write at all and live within commuting distance of Maynooth come along, we meet every few weeks and I’ll post details of the next meeting as soon as it’s organised