There's nothing like a literary game to get your creative juices flowing. I've been playing them for a long time, and they always lead to something great, if not usable.
The goal in playing literary games isn't to write a finished product, although that may happen. It might be to just write an excerpt. Or the start of a story. Maybe it's to imagine the end of a story before you've thought of the beginning. It may be just a fragment, something you'll use years later in a larger work.
It's not about how you use your creative work. Rather, the point is to create something new.
Some games are merely wordplay. Others are meant to be solo creative exercises. And others—like the exquisite corpse (one of my faves)—are group creative exercises. A literary game may be a prompt, an image, a word or sentence, a writing assignment, role playing with characters, exploring the imagination, and more. This week, we're starting simple. As we get into the literary games a little more, we'll get more nuanced. More creative. And that means ... more fun!
Literary Game No. 1: ‘Whispers Before the Flood’
Let's get to the rules. We're keeping it simple.
Your task this week is to create something with words, but no more than 1,000. It can be a flash fiction story, a poem, a creative nonfiction piece, or a hybrid literary work. Feel free to get innovative, creative, go avant-garde. Or stay traditional. It's entirely up to you. As long as you follow the guidelines, which are these:
- Write a story, poem, or something else around the theme "Whispers Before the Flood." How you interpret flood is entirely up to you.
- Keep it to less than 1,000 words
- Publish before next Tuesday, May 27, 2025, 12:00 UTC
- Tag your story #literarygames. This makes it easy to go through all the stories and read them. You can use any other tags you want (as long as they are appropriate - no TAG SPAMMING), but you must use #literarygames.
- Be sure to read other participants' stories. Upvote the ones you like and comment on them. Be supportive of each other.
- Since there is no community for Literary Games, feel free to post into any writing community where your original content would be appropriate. Be sure to follow that community's rules.
- Show your support for me and the literary game by upvoting this post and reblogging it. Reblogging each week's literary game gets more people interested in playing the games and could lead to more potential readers for you.
- Once your piece is published, come back to this post and drop a link to your story, poem, or whatever in the comments.
- Above all, HAVE FUN!
Next week, I'll link to all the stories that are tagged with the Literary Games tag (#literarygames) and issue a new literary game. I'm looking forward to reading your stories, poems, and other creations. Go forthwith and conk her!
👉 See what I did there? 👆
Image created using ImageFX and Whisk.
Hivians tagged below have expressed an interest in the literary games. If you don't want to be tagged in future posts, let me know: