Month: May 2026

The Association Game

A game in which one player begins with a category. Not an abstraction, like “love” (All you need, is a many splendored thing, means never having to say your sorry, is all around you, in the afternoon, and death, actually), but something specific like the color blue. Then each player calls out something associated with that category.

For instance—and this is from the opening of William Gass’s On Being Blue:

Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music; Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentees of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese … the pedantic, indecent and censorious … watered twilight, sour seas: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.

Play proceeds until a player announces an association that is unknown to the other players. The player making the surprising announcement the must give a specific citation from memory (of course) to support their claim (“Blue Tango,” by Leroy Anderson, and covered by dozens of musicians—you should be so happy to be playing with a group who does not know this, and who allows you to win with such a simple association). If the claim is unsupported (either by the player’s lack of specific reference or obvious deceit—to be decided by the fellow players!), the player who made it is exiled. The game continues without them.

Naturally, this game should be played by those of equal experience and equal fascination for the world. Otherwise, boredom and disdain ensues. Recommended for groups of four to eight. Can be played with fewer (a solitaire version, for instance), but more than eight tends to mean the table (players should be seated at a table) is too large, and associations will not be clearly heard.

No devices permitted either in the generation or confirmation or associations.

The game is played for an hour after dinner, and may continue on as many consecutive nights as necessary. When the game is won, cocktails are served, even to those not yet of drinking age, even to those who eschew alcohol.

The Vivid and Continuous Dream

One of the advantages of the daily writing practice is the arrival of the unexpected.

In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner insisted that fiction comprised a “vivid and continuous dream.” Of course. When I write, I am trying to pick the most vivid language to bring a scene or character to life in the mind of the reader. I also try to build a plot that the reader can follow—with enough twists and turns to make the experience satisfactory. But that is continuity—I can’t have a cell phone ring in 17th century France, and if my characters start spouting Nietzsche—two centuries before he was born—well, maybe I need to change the setting.

And this is part of the challenge of writing. One doesn’t just sit down and spew whatever comes to mind. Do that and the reader is more than likely to throw your book—if, somehow you got your story into book form—across the room. But getting it right is a worthy challenge, and a challenge answered in so many different ways to free the writer to explore a thousand different solutions to any given problem.

But solving those problems often relies on an act of will. I want my character to walk across a plaza and into a garden, and so I put her feet on the ground and send her across the stone tiles, to find what? Pick your flowers, keep going. Does the choice of flower matter? Of course it does. Some reader, somewhere, will see those flowers, and, if I’ve done my job, and might even stop to smell them. If it matters. Otherwise, don’t dawdle, keep going. If someone important is waiting in the garden and I spend a paragraph—even a sentence—too long and delay the meeting, I have interrupted the continuous dream.

All that said, there are writers whose talent for encyclopedic detail delights—please show me the long-tongued bee pollinating purple gladiolus under the summer sun. None of that happens by accident.

And yet, I can’t imagine anything as accidental as a dream. They come unbidden in the night and are so full of details and characters as to render most fiction and cinema boring in compare. If dreams are incomprehensible, especially when compared to an episode of Friends—or even better a 60 second TikTok of a scene from an episode of Friends—such is the nature of dreams. Dreams defy the will; even lucid dreamers count on their randomness to produce a landscape that is always a surprise.

When I write only once or twice a week, the writing tends to be more focused on getting from point A to point B (or R). This is also true when I write every day. However, settling in for 3 to 5 hours, and knowing that I will have that 3 to 5 hours the next day and the next (some days getting to 6, some days, leaving after 2 while in the middle of a sentence) creates a space that is more conducive to dreaminess—and the beneficial surprises of dreams.

When Gardner wrote about the “vivid and continuous dream,” he wasn’t writing about hack fiction that simply tells us what we already believe—the well trod road of confirmation. Dreams—and good fiction—surprise us. What is true for the reader must also be true for the writer. Writing a decent piece of fiction should make the familiar strange, should surprise the writer with things previously—and genuinely—unknown.

“Vivid and continuous,” yes, but also a dream.