So the sentence game, what it was is, we’d all get sheets of paper and write down a sentence, any sentence we wanted. And then, you would just pass the paper on to the next person. And then what would happen next is someone would read that sentence and have to draw a picture of what that sentence was, draw an image for it. And then once they had the picture that they drew, they would fold the piece of paper over so it covered the sentence, so the next person, the only thing they could see was the picture. And then pass the paper to the next person, and the person would look at the image and then write a sentence for it, and so once they had the sentence they would fold over the image, and the next person would draw an image for that sentence, and so on, and so on, until you feel like you’ve done enough.

Context:

I learned about the sentence game one of my first few Page meetings that I attended. Which, The Page was this awesome writing group, which was super cool, at my high school. For me, I wasn’t… I was an English nerd, but not really part of a group, and this was a fun way to get involved. It was like telephone but with words and funny images and weird sentences, and your sentence always developed into something that was completely the opposite from what it began with… and it was funny to see how it evolved over time… with different images and different sentences… and seeing different interpretations of the last person’s sentence and the last person’s image. And the more switches you did, the more it’d be kind of, like, funny. And I did it with my friends and then it got me even more involved ’cause then I wanted to come up with more writing games, and… that’s kind of one of the things that I did more with that organization, is I was constantly wanting to do different games and different ways to get people involved with the subject, because I loved making the subject fun… when I could, and using words like that.

Background (from interviewer):

My informant is a good friend from high school, and a fellow “English nerd.” She is a talented writer, and is now an English Education major at her university. When she first joined The Page, she was a very comedic writer, before veering into more serious themes. By our senior year, she and I jointly ran The Page and other writing clubs at our school.

The sentence game was originally meant as a writing exercise, or prompt, to get us thinking of ideas to write later on in Page meetings. Later, it turned into our default activity when the teachers who normally ran the club were too busy and the students were left to our own devices.