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

Ugh… Vampires

Says it all really, doesn’t it?

But why does it say it all? Why do so many of us cringe at the word Vampire these days? Hmm… I wonder…

Oh yeah, this heap of shite:

Or “Twi-Shite” as it’s fondly known amongst my friends.

I know this is probably like flogging a dead horse to most of you out there at this point but after spending copious amounts of time in the presence of teen girls at recent family events I feel it can’t be reiterrated enough. Twilight is a scourge on the face of prose and it is extremely frustrating seeing stuff like this get published for vast sums of money. There is clearly little or no quality control in some publishing houses and unfortunately many good writers are being overlooked in the face of this ‘make-a-quick-buck’ utter brain fluff type fiction (I wonder if Easons would consider replacing their ‘paranormal romance’ section with the ‘make-a-quick-buck’ section?)

Rather than go on about the series many flaws (though I’m not ruling it out as a future blog post) I thought I’d introduce a particular Vampire favourite of my own, This:

It is a LARP (Live action Role-playing game for all you muggles) where you create a character who’s more often than not a vampire and you attend ‘court’ or vampire meetings. It’s similar to drama improv and it is immensely cooler than I’m making it sound here. For example on a typical evening we’d meet somewhere on Maynooth campus because they have plenty of rooms we can use for free. We show up in character, some people even dress up. There’s a Prince or head vampire that runs the meeting and there is endless amounts of scheming, backstabbing, violence and crazy events. Most recently my character made a deal with a much older, higher up vampire to put my powers at her service in exchange for information on my missing sire (the vampire who turned me into a vampire), however, my character is far too young to actually have these powers and now that other vampire staged a coup and became Prince she will be calling in her debts pretty soon…

Awesome right? I used to play games like this with my cousin when we were kids only much less detailed and much more PG, We’d pretend we were dragon riders or the crew of a space station and inevitably run around his back garden with various props yelling at each other. So I’m still a big kid really.

 Everything is interconnected, political manoueverings in Dublin games affect us in Maynooth and the best part is I’ve been playing for about nine months and I still haven’t had to read the rulebook! (take that Warhammer 40k and your ridiculously complicated game) People are more than willing to help noobs ann as my character is a vampire who’s only just come out of hiding after 80 years it makes sense that she wouldn’t understand anything. For more info check out Camarilla Ireland

The reason I went on about this in such length is that the games are excellent resources for writers. Not just for people writing about vampires, they have games involving all manner of mythical creatures and horror scenarios, their Changeling: The Lost  rulebook helped me with my current WIP. The fluff surrounding the games is often well written but the real reason they’re useful is characterisation.

I initially had trouble with this, all my characters seemed the same or else they were crude, sitcom style cut-outs. It is difficult to underestimate the effort some people put into their characters for Vampire. It’s more than just amazing acting (Disclaimer: I do not count myself among the good actors), there is huge detail to their back stories and motivations. If anyone wants to know how to write really in-depth characters with complicated relations to each other but not use an information dump then go to a Cam game. I specifically made my character shy and distrustful so I could sit and observe, as she (and I) gradually learned about the people around me so the plot gets managebly more detailed and compelling. The characters seem realistic because it is real people considering their actions and motivations based on their character sheets, It’s a great example of character driven fiction as we have no foreknowledge of the plot.

A schedule of games can be found on their website and they are played monthly in Dublin, Maynooth and Cork.

Go forth and characterise!

1st Person Vs. 3rd Person

So the battle of perspectives has begun.

I spent most of the summer obsessing over my Work-in-Progress (a novel): What will my main character be like, What order will things happen in, researching life in Ireland in th 1850’s, deciding that was too boring, changing it to Ireland in the 1950s…

Stuff like that plus staring blankly at the wall in front of my desk. There was a lot of that. So the most recent brick wall I ran into was that of Perspective. Should I tell it in the first or third person perspective.

1st person pros:

I want the book to be character driven. I want to leave a certain ambiguity around a large portion of the events (i.e. did they really happen or was it all in her head?). and this will be easier to achieve through 1st person. I’ve read a few books from a child’s perspective such as Room which gave a really unique slant on events. I’m already 8,000 words into a draft written in the 1st perspective.

3rd person pros:

I can tell other characters stories in much more detail than if i used 1st person. The main character won’t have to be there for all major events. I write better in 3rd person, I’m more comfortable with it. I’m only 8,000 words in so if I want to change perspective the time is now instead of re-writing 40,000 words later down the line. I don’t know if I can write this particular story (convey my themes etc.) using the linguistic register of a child (Just to clarify, I’m aiming the book at adults).

So how did i figure it out?

By doing nothing.

I left the book alone for three weeks, not wanting to go much further in case I’d be forced to change it all later on. I wrote a few notes and things. Went back to college, caught up with friends, joined more societies than what’s strictly healthy and read a lot.

This book solved everything for me. Reccommended to me by a friend it told a brilliant story, from the point of view of a child, in the third person! It helped me decide early on in the in a scene where the protagonist is walking through the woods, intercut with the antagonists point of view (don’t want to ruin it but if you’ve read it you which bit I’m talking about), the scene is very complex and handled very skillfully. He handles dark complex things in an adult register while still showing a certain degree of childhood innocence which is exactly what I want to capture (though I don’t want to go quite as disturbing and unsettling as he goes at some points). I finished the book and learned a lot from it.

So off I go to start again back at page 1 but with a much clearer idea of how to go about it. Doing nothing finally paid off.

Diary of an English student

Well here is my blog. Welcome, come in, wipe your feet and grab a beer.

I’m going into final year of my BA in the National University of  Ireland Maynooth. That means a big-ass dissertation/creative writing project, a lot of essays and severe curtailing of my xbox time. My minor subject is Greek and Roman Civilisation, much more relaxed but English is still my favourite. I love that feeling of emptiness I get after finishing a really good book, like there’s something missing now that you don’t have that book to read anymore. I want to be an author and I hope some day something I write will leave people feeling like that. This blog is basically going to be about my experiences studying english in Maynooth and english in general. I’ll post discussions on interesting things I’ve learned or noticed, reviews of the odd book I get time to read that’s not on the course (or ones on the course I particularly enjoyed), explorations of the essay topics I’ll be given, bits and pieces about writing and my experience of writing.

This move was prompted by a friend’s blog,  he reviews YA fiction and posts teasers from his intriguing novel and I’ve decided to jump on the bandwagon. I started a novel at the beginning of summer that I intend to submit for my final year creative writing project and have only squeezed out a few thousand words. Hopefully the obligation to post to the faceless internet might push me to stay focused and write more frequently.

That’s the theory anyway…