Gamification of bookification

Photo by Muteboy, Selected Patience Games Book Cover

A few weeks ago, Jane McGonigal declared that she was going to game-ify writing her book — using techniques from game design to persuade herself to write more, for example writing the easiest chapters (”level one”) first and making a record of her progress publicly available.

There’s plenty of this trick-yourself-into-writing stuff about, of course, but it’s really interesting to explicitly formulate it as a game, and probably worth looking at similar tricks that writers have used without necessarily seeing them as playful. There are the people who have, like Jane, written their chapters out of order — Margaret Mitchell wrote the last chapter of “Gone With the Wind” first and then gave the book to a publisher without getting around to Chapter 1; Vladimir Nabokov wrote on index cards so he could shuffle them around at will; Warren Ellis is “known to start with a scene somewhere in the middle with no characters or setting and build in both directions”. But there’s also stuff like:

• P.G. Wodehouse used to stick all the pages of a manuscript around the room, high on the wall if he thought they were really good, low if they weren’t:

  A first draft for Wodehouse was a question of getting the essential ingredients of a story organised—its plot structure, its characters and their comings and goings, the mountains they climb and the cliffs they fall off. It is the next stage of writing—the relentless revising, refining, and polishing—that turned his works into the marvels of language we know and love. When he was writing a book, he used to pin the pages in undulating waves around the wall of his workroom. Pages he felt were working well would be pinned up high, and those that still needed work would be lower down the wall. His aim was to get the entire manuscript up to the picture rail before he handed it in. (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt)

• I think it’s Malcolm Bradbury (in Unsent Letters, perhaps?) who writes about working on two different projects at a time, both of them collaborations with a friend. He and the friend would sit opposite each other at the kitchen table, one typewriter each; and whenever either of them got stuck they’d call out or ring a bell, and the two of them would move around the table to swap typewriters and stories. (This one might have been fictional — the Unsent Letters are not particularly reliable — but it’s a fun idea.)
• Sven Lindqvist has written in numbered pieces for a long time, and was further “inspired by the manuals of the role-playing games”.
• National Novel Writing Month is maybe the most successful writing game ever — and it is almost explicitly a game. People sign up every November, over 100,000 of them, and they all try to write a 50,000 word novel within a month (success rate for 2007 was around 15%). There are wordcount widgets so that writers can show people how many words they’ve written; there’s a Word Count Scoreboard, showing which regions and genres have amassed the greatest bulk of novel. People who reach the 50,000 word mark are even declared “winners”, with a web badge and pdf certificate marking the fact.
• Write or Die is particularly interesting, and was pretty widely used last National Novel Writing Month. You set a time limit or a wordcount aim, and it gives you a text box to write in. If you hesitate for too long first the background starts shading from white through pink to red; then horrible music starts to play; and then finally — if you have it on “kamikaze” setting - the most recent words you’ve typed begin to disappear from the screen. I find this extremely useful when I can bring myself to use it (I would have missed at least a couple of Minor Delays deadlines without it), but I’m always reluctant, because it shuts out the possibility of distraction (wonderful distraction!) so completely.

As a nice contrast: Kent Haruf writes his first draft sitting in a cellar with a woollen cap pulled over his eyes, touch-typing, unable to see his surroundings, unable to see what he’s written for that matter. (He writes about it here). Difficult to argue that it’s a game-like technique, but it’s the same intent: concentrating attention, shifting the relationship between the external world and writing, convincing yourself to do something you wouldn’t have done otherwise.