Today we have another fun writing game from Paperback Writer. This one is called the Name Game.

1. Take your local phone book and find five random listings for couples and write down their first names, then select five surnames at random from different pages and assign them to your couples.
2. Pick five major (as in life-changing) events that routinely happen to couples, and assign one to each of your couples (you can do this at random or by what feels right for each couple).
3. Choose a primary conflict for each of your couples (this can be about the major event, the couple, or totally unrelated) and add that to your description.
4. Now, add another complication, but this time choose one that ties the couple’s major event to their primary conflict.
5. Using the major event, primary conflict and complication, decide on a resolution for each couple’s story.

You can use this as the basis for a short story (a particular scene from the couple’s lives) or for a novel. Even as a subplot in an existing novel. You can twist the scenarios toward a particular genre or to include specific themes as suits your fancy.

However you choose to do it, building up your inventory of stories and novels gives you more pieces to keep in play with editors and agents along with a sense of accomplishment with each piece you finish.

This quote from Isaac Asimov is good advice:

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.

Good luck with building your inventory!

If you’re up for a challenge on building up your inventory of writing, try Paperback Writer’s Dictionary: Impossible.

Take a dictionary, flip through, stop on a random page and write down the first word you see. Repeat until you have 10 words. Then you begin to play.

Level One: Create at least three novel titles using only the words on your list (a, an, the, and other simple words can be added for style.) You have five minutes to complete this level.

Level Two: Create a story premise for the titles you’ve created from your list.

Level Three: Write an opening line for the title/story premises you’ve created.

Level Four: Write the story to go with one of your opening lines, premises and titles.

Level Five: Write the stories to go with all of them, and you win Dictionary: Impossible.

Check out PBW’s post for her hilarious examples. For a fun way to create some new story ideas, try out Dictionary: Impossible.

For more encouragement in building your inventory, take a look at Ray Bradbury’s record. He’s written a story a week, on average, since he was 12 years old. He started writing in 1932. Doing the math, that’s nearly 4000 stories. That’s a lot of inventory. And Ray sent those stories out to magazine editors, many before they were any good, as he later learned. But he kept on writing and he kept on sending them out.

He writes 1000-2000 words a day, every day, even now, though he has switched to dictating his stories to his daughter over the phone.

His advice to writers:

…stop being an intellect. Get your work done. Don’t worry about what you’re doing. Don’t plan anything. Just do it. Throw it up. Throw it up, and then clean up. I was at a bookstore last night and a book clerk there said, ‘I’m having trouble with a novel I’m writing. I do this, I do that.’ I said, ‘Stop that’ — no outlines, no plans. Get your characters to write the book for you. Ahab wrote Moby Dick, Melville didn’t. Montag wrote Fahrenheit 451, I didn’t. If you let your characters live, and get out of their way, then you have a chance of creating something individual.

Can you write a story a week? A chapter a week, if you’re working on a novel? You can. Try Ray’s method… don’t think, don’t plan, just write. See where your characters take you. Get words down on the paper and then clean them up and make them sparkle.

Building your inventory of stories and novels gives you a lot of manuscripts to send out to agents and editors. But how do you work up to creating so many stories? One way is by building your writing muscles. Shannon Donnelly has written an article to help you build up those muscles for the long haul.

10 Steps to Big Writing Muscles

1. Pay attention to your body. Eat well-balanced meals, limit alcohol and caffeine so your mind stays sharp.
2. Establish a habit of “warms-up” that begin every writing session. Sit at your desk and write one page of anything.
3. Go over last five pages of your current project and do light editing.
4. Stretch yourself by writing one more page each week than you consider productive and comfortable.
5. Plan your training. If you write short stories, work your sprinting muscles by write a new short story each week. If you write novels, write every day to develop your marathon muscles.
6. Avoid writer’s block with two strategies – stop writing in mid-sentence and mid scene and no staring at the blank screen… write something, anything.
7. Pay yourself as motivation. Set your per page rate and put the money into a piggy bank to be spent after you finish your first draft and a second-draft edit.
8. Make your writing place comfortably yours with the proper furniture and equipment.
9. Ease yourself back into your training schedule after vacation or illness.
10. Take short breaks during your writing sessions.

Daily writing progress will build your writing muscles. Get started today.

Here’s some more encouragement to build your writing inventory. Jay Lake, author of four science fiction novels, has laid out his four guidelines for writing fiction. The day I discovered them, the light bulb went on. I hadn’t ever considered that writing a lot of stories would give me a lot of stories to potentially sell. I know… it seems like a ‘duh’ statement. But I thought that I should concentrate on only my BIG ideas. The novels that I would sell for million dollar advances. (Dream on.) Jay’s guidelines were a refreshingly different perspective.

1. Write a story every week.
2. Finish everything you start.
3. Don’t self-critique while you’re writing.
4. Work on one thing at a time.

A story every week seemed impossible at first. Is he kidding? What kind of quality is going to come out of something written so fast? And what if I can’t come up with a story idea every week? To my amazement, I didn’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. And the quality of the finished stories wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be.

Finish everything you start seemed like a no-brainer. But then I started mentally counting the number of unfinished stories I have on hand. Hmmm… maybe this one does apply to me. Half-written stories don’t do me any good. I can’t sell them. I can’t even revise them properly. Not until they’re finished. So another good rule.

But don’t self-critique while you’re writing seemed a bit much. On the rare occasion that I write something dreadfully dull, I want to fix it as soon as possible. Light editing while I’m writing makes me feel good. Like I’m actually turning out something decent. But as I read through his reason for this rule, it began to make sense. Let the story flow out of you until it is done. Don’t gag the muse when she’s speaking to you. When it’s done, you can go back and judge it. You might just find that the uncensored, unedited voice of your story is actually pretty good.

His final piece of advice to work on one thing at a time speaks to our multi-tasking tendencies. It’s too easy to start several different projects (so many good ideas out there!) and then ramble around on them, making little progress. Start a story, work on it until it is done, then start another.

If Jay’s guidelines work for you, you’ll find yourself quickly building an inventory of stories that you can send out. If short stories aren’t for you, you can modify the guidelines. If you’re a novel writer, then write a new chapter a week. Work on it until it’s done. Don’t edit until you’re finished with the entire novel. Just work on one novel at a time. There’s some pretty sound advice in Jay’s guidelines.

Next up, a way to build your writing muscles for the long haul.

If you don’t write it, you can’t sell it. Seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? But it can be easy to get caught up in the creative side of writing and forget all about the business aspects. After all, we’re writers, artists… we take our imagination and weave stories of adventure, passion, intrigue to beguile our readers. Art takes time to produce if you want a quality product.

But the word “product” is the one we have to remember. Yes, you’re telling a fabulous story to entertain and enthrall your readers. But it is also your product, the thing that you produce and, with a lot of work, some luck and the stars aligned just so, the thing that you sell.

So many of us are striving to quit our day jobs and work full-time as writers. We’ve all heard the statistics about how many achieve that. And how many don’t. If you want to support yourself as a full-time writer, you need to have stories (short or novel-length) to sell and they need to be available on a regular basis.

Quality is important in what you write, so just churning out words is not the best way to build your inventory. By focusing on completing more pieces, though, you can build your writing “muscles” and have more available to sell.

Angela Booth gives the advantages of building your writing inventory in her article Build Your Writing Inventory where she talks about building inventory for both fiction and non-fiction writers.

• Lack of pressure. There’s no pressure when you’re writing for inventory. This means you can be creative, and can take risks.
• You’ve got lots of work extant, so you can court a new market immediately, as soon as you find it. This increases the likelihood that you will get your foot in the door with a new magazine, or a new publishing house, and have your work purchased simply because you showed up when your work was needed.
• When a new market appears, it takes several months for it to register on the radar screen of writers. Once the market has been listed in a writers’ marketing guide, they’ll be flooded with work. If you can get in early, the chances of your work being purchased goes up, simply because it will be read with more care.
• You’ve always got something to sell. “Rejection” has no meaning for you. Rejection simply means that you haven’t yet found a home for a piece of work.

While you’re working on your best-seller, keep these things in mind:

1. You can’t make money as a writer without a product (i.e., novel, short story, article) to sell.
2. The more products you have, the better chance you have of selling something.

In the next few days, we’ll talk more about how you can build your inventory of writing products, so you’re ready when the right publishing opportunity comes along.