I’m a big proponent of writing groups. A good writing group is wonderful for building a support system and for getting feedback on your writing. But writing groups can get stuck in a rut sometimes. If your meetings are starting to feel a little stale, a game can liven them up. Playing boosts creativity and builds trust. Try one of these games with your writing friends and let loose the goofiness!

As a group, brainstorm a list of iconic movie titles. Continue until you have twenty-four movie titles that everyone is pretty well familiar with. Once you agree on the list, you’re ready to start the game.

One person goes first. On their turn, they choose two movie titles from the list and pairing them up in the classic elevator pitch format: _____________ meets ______________. (If you want random pairings, you can figure out a way to generate a random number on the list. The title next to that number is the movie in the first blank. Then do it again to fill the second blank.) For example, you might end up withThe Firm meets Willie Wonka. Or Ferris Bueller meets The Matrix. Or Diary of a Wimpy Kid meets The Ten Commandments. Now take a few minutes and have everybody write a super short plot summary for that novel or movie. Two or three sentences should do it.

Keep going until every player has had at least one turn to choose the two titles. This silly game will flex your creative muscles and generate ridiculous story ideas. And who knows? One of those goofy ideas might spark something worthwhile!

2. Character Icebreaker

To help each other explore characters, you can play an icebreaker game with everyone playing on behalf of one of their characters. Here’s an easy way to do it.

You’ll need a pack of blank index cards and this list of icebreaker questions (or something similar). From the beginning, each player chooses a character from their current work-in-progress, and throughout the game, they will answer as their character would.

Players take turns being the moderator. The moderator chooses a question from the list and asks the same question to all the players. Each player thinks about how their character would respond to the question and writes their answer on a card. The moderator then collects the cards. Setting a timer is optional.

Once the moderator has all the answer cards, he reads them aloud and the other players try to guess which person wrote that answer. If you want to take this concept further, you could play a commercial conversation game with everyone answering as their characters would. Games like Table Topics, Loaded Questions, or Say Anything, would work nicely.

3. Brainwriting

For this game, I adapted a technique known as 6-3-5 Brainwriting, which was originally developed for nurturing innovation in business and marketing.

The number of rounds in the game will be equal to the number of people in the group. We did this with six people, so there were six rounds. Each round is five minutes, which meant the whole thing took thirty minutes.

In the first round, each person writes a problem or challenge at the top of their paper. It might be something to do with their story, their writing life, book promotion, or anything writing-related. You could probably do this on a blank piece of paper, but if you like, you can have a look at the simple grid I used.

For Round Two, everyone passes their paper to the person on the left. Each person writes three ideas for dealing with the problem written at the top of the paper they have. Five minutes should be enough time to do that. Brainstorming is supposed to be fast and not all ideas are going to be great. That’s perfectly fine because a less-than-great idea can lead to the perfect solution. There was a bit of groaning and begging for more time in the early rounds, but then everyone eventually caught on to the fact that they had to spit out ideas quickly.

Repeat Round Two until everyone at the table has had a turn to add ideas to each paper. If you want to keep going, you could have the papers travel around the table twice, each time adding more ideas. We agreed that we weren’t allowed to repeat someone else’s idea, but we could add a different variation of a previous idea. We also agreed that we could draw a little star or a smiley face on a previous idea that we agreed with.

At the end of all the rounds, each paper should reach its original owner. After that, we took a few minutes to look them over, discuss, and circle our favorite ideas. In just half an hour of our meeting time, everyone went home with at least fifteen new ideas to help solve a problem. The game lended a fantastic feeling of encouragement and support to our group.

I suppose this last one might not fall into solidly into the game category, but we treated it like one. And that’s the point–don’t take any of these activities too seriously. Encourage everyone to be silly and insist on no judging of ideas. You’ll be surprised at how much it improves the atmosphere in the group.