Same-Oh
a word game for us to play together
Possibly boring stuff first:
January is slipping away and I’ve yet to send out Q4 snail mail! Paid subscribers can find the link at the end of this post. I want to take the snail mail benefit in a slightly different direction for 2026, but don’t want to announce anything quite yet to make sure it’s something I can execute properly. Stay tuned!
I am very aware of how limited my time/ energy is these days and how that translates into how often I’m showing up here and what I can offer paid subscribers. My visual journaling for writers course is the main perk! I have plans to add an additional course, as well as a draft of my memoir, but there’s no specific timeline for those right now.
On with the show!
I’m reorienting back to my writing this year, and with that comes a renewed desire to make sure I’m leaving time to play with words. I want to find a looseness and playfulness with my prose that is only possible when you actually are loose and playful with words. I was noodling around with how, exactly, to do that in the margins of a busy life when I remembered a LiveJournal community I was part of, way back in the day— Same-oh.
Moderated by a user going by the name isom, the game was simple: with a random list of words, participants would write something (prose, poetry, whatever) in 30 minutes or less. In the community, we were encouraged to share our completed pieces in the comments and marvel at how we all went different places from the same set of words.
The game had, according to the profile page, grown out of a round of Scrabble between friends.
I remember being entranced by this community, which to me still typifies Internet culture in the early aughts: making something just to make it, and share with others. I can’t recall ever sharing anything in the comment section (I felt shy about claiming any part of a “writer” identity), but I did often dutifully copy lists of words into my journal and play with them there. So while this is 100% not my idea, I thought I would revive the game (the community hasn’t been updated since 2016).
For each set of words, write something, using every word or form of the word (feel free to play with plurals, past tense, etc). The original rules allowed 30 minutes, but I would challenge you to play in 15 minutes or less to make it truly an activity to you can fit in any little crack in your day.
When you’re done, feel free to pop back in and share your end result in the comments so we can admire your creativity and compare the end results. That’s it! I hope this will be a FUN and generative practice.
Download your first set of Same-oh words below.
I collected these words from whatever I was reading, or any time a word popped into my head where I thought, “ooh, that’s a good one.” You can do the same! The less thought you put into your groupings of five words, the better. (Feel free to share your lists here!)
Sprinkle lists of words on random pages of your notebook or planner, then make something with them whenever you happen upon them. We love synchronicity— the right words will find you on the right day.
Maybe your prose/poem/whatever has inspired a collage or doodle?
Keep going! Revise and expand your initial writing, no longer beholden to the same-oh rules.