Writing Exercises

What are Writing Exercises?

Writing exercises are little exercises, taking anywhere from a minute to an hour to carry out. They encourage you to write in a free way and help you to improve your writing. Most of the things you write during writing exercises will be purely for yourself, you won’t be planning to let the whole world see them, so it is important to write without having publication in mind – write for yourself.

Many authors have found that by doing a writing exercise everyday the quality of their writing has significantly improved compared to what it use to be like. Essentially, these writing exercises are little practises for you and a time to experiment.

Why do Writing Exercises?

Writing exercises are a great way to stimulate your brain before writing as they get you into the right mindset. Authors who write for a living often need to write everyday in order to meet deadlines; many have found that doing writing exercises helps them to focus and improve their writing. These exercises work as a ‘warm up’ and prepare you for your main writing, as well as providing new ideas for other works. They are also fun to do and can help you create small pieces that are salable on their own.

Do Writing Exercises help against Writers’ Block?

Many authors believe that if they write everyday, they limit the chances of getting writers’ block (for a long period of time, at least). The important thing to do is to keep writing, so even if you just do a simple five minute exercise everyday you’re still writing. It’s important to write as often as you can – writing exercises can often stimulate new ideas for short stories or even novels and it’s fun to have a bit of ‘free time’ where you don’t have to stick to what you’re writing, but can experiment and be ‘wild’. Even writing a diary entry for your day can be a writing exercise.

Types of Writing Exercises.

There are many different types of writing exercises, but they usually all have two things in common:
– a time limit
– you keep writing

There are literally thousands of writing exercises that you could do. Mainly they fall into three groups:
– character writing
– description writing
– action/even writing

A common writing exercise is to write a short story in 30 minutes. This story can be based on the work that you are doing at the moment – you could take a background character and write about their life or a significant event or thing that has happened to them. Not only does this build more depth into your own novel, but also improves your writing as by setting a time limit you’re less likely to go off on a tangent, and be more picky about what you say. This is why many authors have a specific time of day that they write during.

Another writing exercise you could do would be to take a short piece of writing you’ve already done and write it in a different person or tense.

Why not open a magazine and a choose a picture off a page and make up a story behind it.

Or write a dramatic monolouge for a character out of one of your favourite books.

But not all writing exercises have to produce a piece of writing…

You could pick a word out the dictionary and try to come up with as many different synonyms as possible. And then do the same, but with the ananyms of the word.

A great writing exercise that’s fun is to start with a random word, and then change one letter in the first word so that it makes another. And then keep doing it and see how long you can go on for.

Or read a short descriptive passage and draw what you imagine and try to include as much detail as possible. Then the next day you could look at your picture and write a descriptive scene about it and see how close to the original it is.

I like to listen to music and just write down a few words from the lyrics and then add my own adjectives which fit in. I then find I have a page with words all over that build up a certain atmosphere which I can then use later when I write a particular scene.

The important thing to do is to keep writing!