Pick four sentences: A simple creative writing game

A few years ago, probably when my niece was in fifth grade, my sister-in-law Jill came up with this story-writing game that I still play with my niece from time to time:

• Take a book, open it to a random page.
• Without looking, point to a sentence on that page and write it down
• Take another book and do the same thing.
• Do it two more times so you have four sentences, total.
• Now write a short story that incorporates those sentences, verbatim.
• (It's OK if the stories are a little bit silly)
• When everybody's done, read the stories to each other.

Over the years we've found that it tends to throw an amusing constraint into your process if you include a nonfiction book in the mix (you can overdo it if you include too many, though).

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Here's an example I wrote for this post:

I bring you a tale of hubris and folly, a cautionary tale for those too eager to leap without looking. It began in the quiet Massachusetts town of Wortham when the garment plant closed and the workers were looking for new employment. But also it began earlier than that, in the mind of Hayden Brundage, with the creation of Total Yield Fishing. Brundage was an entrepreneur, thought leader, and business theorist. As the fisheries business boomed Brundage made the rounds of all the business shows, explaining that the elimination of wasteful redundancy and lost catch were the keys. His book The Secrets of Total Yield Fishing became an international bestseller. Wortham, which had been a fishing town in colonial days, took to Total Yield Fishing immediately. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.

In those days, with the brighter eyes of youth, I thought Brundage could do no wrong, and he himself would never dare to disabuse anyone of that notion. (I should know—some years later I taught with him at Harvard Business School, where he proudly displayed on his wall a 1980 Fortune article that named him one of the ten toughest managers in America.) I invited him to our Yield Hall to give a speech on the occasion of the launch of our new fishing boats, still deeply leveraged against every ounce of collateral that anyone in town could muster. He not only gave the speech but offered to lead us out on our first voyage. How could we have known this would doom us?

We set out, but a fog rolled in. Sheepishly I suggested we turn back, but Brundage scoffed and demanded we go ever onward. I suggested that we should at least pull in the nets, but Brundage declared that the most basic tenet of Total Yield Fishing is to never pull in the nets until you're certain they're full. In the fog we must have gotten turned back toward the coast and begun sailing up a river and then a stream. It became clearer and clearer that the nets were sliding through mud at the bottom, but Brundage would hear no doubts. Eventually tree branches began scraping the sides of the boats, carving gashes in the paint, and even scratching the new glass windows. It was clear we were no longer at sea but had sailed into a marsh. Brundage finally relented and allowed us to pull in the nets, now covered with the clingy mud of the swamp. We hung them from every surface we could, hoping they weren't ruined.

As the sun went down I went inside the cabin to sleep. As I lay in the bunk I looked out at the stars through the scratched glass. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry. When dawn came I found that all of the other fishermen had abandoned us, fearing that we were trapped too deep in the swamp to ever recover the boats. They did not know, and could not guess in that misty light, that they were in fact only just within the northern borders of the marshes, the main expanse of which lay south of them. Brundage, ever the opportunist, declared the boats salvage and laid claim to them. When we got back to a port he sold them for a handsome sum, and the debts of the former owners surely killed the town. I never went back, Brundage cut me in one some of the proceeds and offered to put in a good word for me at the business school. I was too weak a man then to tell anyone of what Brundage had done, but I could not go to my grave with this still on my conscience.

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The starting sentences were:
The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry. [Cat's Cradle p. 113]

Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence in the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green. [Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre p. 253]

They did not know, and could not guess in that misty light, that they were in fact only just within the northern borders of the marshes, the main expanse of which lay south of them. [The Two Towers p. 258]

(I should know—some years later I taught with him at Harvard Business School, where he proudly displayed on his wall a 1980 Fortune article that named him one of the ten toughest managers in America.) [The Halo Effect p. 85]

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For such a simple procedure I find that this game works surprisingly well, probably a testament to the power of the human mind to create stories. It can be a bit draining since you're using your creative writing muscles to make it work, and any writer knows that can be taxing. You also have to buy into the spirit of the game to make it work – you're missing the point if you're trying to minimize the sentences rather than using them as the seeds for your story or if you just haphazardly link things together without laying the groundwork so there's at least some flow. But if you do get into the spirit of it, and let the fact that it's "just a game" give you permission to just write a story without worrying about whether it's the greatest thing ever written, it can be a lot of fun.