Creative Writing Exercises: Excerpts from Building a Writing Practice

Daily 20 minute exercises to energize and get your creative juices flowing

Creative writing exercises can help you warm-up for a marathon writing session, beat the dreaded writer’s block, give you variety in your writing and a sense of accomplishment when you finish these.

These warm up exercises help you get into the mood and get flexible over a period of time. You won’t look at your writing projects with dread anymore.

You can take 20 – 30 minutes doing these everyday. If there is a particular exercise you like very much, you can of course repeat it. If there’s an exercise that confuses you, you can of course come back to it later.

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Find analogies for everyday life

“If people were like rain, I was like drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

John Green

Unconventional comparisons of things and events in your writing will make the reader take notice. Make sure that the metaphors and the analogues actually fit and are not written for the sake of it.

Exercise: Describe your routine and find comparisons to make things poetic. Pouring water into the pan for making tea could be akin to a symphony in your mind. As you dust the furniture, the dust motes rising in the air might remind you of dandelions as they disintegrate. Find at least ten different analogies.

How does it help: When you make a connection between unrelated things, you are being creative. It helps you to look for connections in an original manner and to be able to spot netaphors and similes in others’ writing.

All your bestsellers

“A summary of every Jewish holiday. They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.”

Alan King

Some days you seem to be full of so many story ideas that you don’t know where yo begin. Make it a practice to write down your ideas when they occur to you. Keep a dedicated notebook for your ideas, phrases that catch your fancy or even moments that touch you deeply.

Exercise: Imagine you are going to write half a dozen bestsellers. Now go ahead and write the book blurbs for them.

How does it help: It preserves your story ideas and gives you an understanding of a catchy blurb that draws in a reader.

Be Famous

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Annie Dillard

Exercise: Summarise your average day with an eye on events as a newspaper headline reporting sensational news. Rather than writing about one event in your day, summarize your entire day as several different newspaper headlines. Go for a few click bait titles while you are at it. A few examples:

“Stressed employee regrets not emailing the reports on time.”

“Hungry cat escapes home; finds a feast in the neighbourhood garbage dump.” (If you are a cat)

How does it help: It incorporates fun in your writing, making you adept at looking at things from a different angle and of course, putting you at the centre of the story.

If you liked the writing exercises, you can head over to the Blogchatter library and download my ebook for free.

This post is part of Blogchatter Half Marathon.

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