Writing Exercises
Ideas to Stretch Your Imagination and Flex Your Writing Muscles
They also help both emerging and experienced writers discover their own style and increase their word power.
Writing Exercises are also a great way of generating ideas and material.
And just as a runner might swim and a swimmer might run, they wouldn’t let cross-training take over the main game. The runner wouldn’t spend more time in the pool than on the road and the swimmer wouldn’t run more than he swam. Writing exercises shouldn’t be the main activity just a complimentary one.
Here’s just a few suggestions.
Free Writing
Free writing is writing from a prompt, say a single word (horse, leaf, ice-cream) for a pre-determined length of time, say 15 minutes. This is done without the restriction of having to make it sound good. There is no revising, editing or back tracking. In fact it’s a no-no. The idea is to just splash it all down on paper. No stopping either, even if that means having to write ‘I can’t think of anything to write". The purpose of such an exercise is to get the writer away from their normal ways of thinking, and write from a more intuitive place.
Restrictive
Restrictive exercises, as the name suggestes, has some kind of restriction placed on them. It may be the word count eg exactly 100 words (not 99 or 101) or not using a particular letter eg ‘e’, or the restrictions may be to do with the subject matter you're writing about eg describing a holiday without mentioning the name of the place you've visited.
These types of exercises take a lot more mental energy.
Character
Character exercises require the writer to think deeply about their characters, for example who they are, their opinions, likes and dislikes, beliefs, history.
It is, in effect, the writer interviewing their character. It is up to the writer how deeply they delve. Clearly for a less important character, the answers will be less detailed. For a main character, however, the writer needs to know because if the writer, and creator of the character, doesn't know the answer then who does?
A Paragraph or Two
Writing a paragraph or two is usually although not always an observation of some kind. It can be a description of someone in the street, a reaction to something that appeared in a newspaper or magazine or even an overheard conversation. It could be a description of a moment of inspiration or emotional upset, something to be ashamed or guilty about, a long-held regret.
It doesn’t need to be a 2000 word essay with footnotes just a paragraph or two, a few hundred words.
Invention and Imagination
Invention and Imagination exercises are not about reflection on a writer's own experience but rather taking that raw material and turning it into the basis for a story. It may be describing what it is like to be beached on a deserted island after a storm. It may be automatic to imagine a tropic island with white sandy beaches and palm trees. Perhaps instead think of being washed up on a rocky inhospitable beach in the cold Southern Ocean. The writer flexes their imagination to describe the event.
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