First Meeting of You Should Be Writing! Club

Yesterday, I ran the first meeting of You Should Be Writing! Club, which I founded in order to give students a space to learn more about writing for games, narrative design, marketing themselves as writers, and how to get into the habit of writing regularly!

I made sure to set the club during a time when my interested friends could attend, and I mentioned the club to game design students after Justin and I finished our lecture to them about audio and narrative team collaboration. Even though I did not advertise the club extensively, we had a great turnout on the first day and attendees seemed genuinely excited about the activities.

Here's what we covered at the first meeting:

- In November, we'll be running our own Camp NaNoWriMo with the goal of each person writing 5,000 words of a complete story from Nov 1 - Nov 30.

- start thinking about a game narrative you want to analyze for the GDC competition! Check out past winners and make sure no one has analyzed the game you have in mind in the same way.

- start a blog ASAP! Think about how you want to brand yourself, which topics are important to you, and what kind of writing schedule is right for you.

- people proposed topics to cover this semester, which I'll outline and polish before I share it with the group

- check out 750words.com if you want a word tracking tool to force yourself to write at least 750 words each day!

- we wrote for 15 minutes using the prompt below, then we discussed our work:

Today's Writing Prompt Think of your worst rejection. Write a thank-you note to the person who rejected you.

Hopefully people will continue to attend and work together to develop a strong network of DigiPen game writers and narrative designers!