Subscribe to PostsI was recently chatting with a fellow writer who mentioned a friend of hers who wants to write. He has a good idea for a story, but no clue about how to actually put the words together in a coherent tale: no concept of point of view, creating a mood, describing a setting.
This is where writing exercises come in. I believe these are important–vital, in fact–no matter what level you’re at. Even a virtuoso pianist practices scales.
So here are a few simple writing exercises.
Write a short piece, say an exchange between two or three characters–but stick to one POV throughout. And THINK about what that character can see, hear, smell, taste, touch. Example: if one of the other characters is standing behind the POV character, there shouldn’t be any descriptions of that character scratching his nose.
On the topic of show, don’t tell: write another short piece that goes for emotional power. A wedding, a funeral, a soldier dying in his buddy’s arms on the battlefield. Pick something that moves you to sorrow, rage, joy. Write it without using a SINGLE word that states an emotion. For example, you can’t use the words “sorrow”, “rage”, or “joy” in your piece. Adverbs are off limits too: none of those “he cried angrily” lines; that’s cheating.
In creating a setting, write a piece describing the setting from your POV character’s, well, point of view. You don’t need to throw in every detail about a setting. But a character who loves plants is going to notice the wilted geranium in the corner while a geek is going to notice the Alienware laptop on the table. This kind of description tells us about your characters without you as the writer having to tell us this character loves plants and that character is a computer nerd.
This, by the way, has the seed of yet another writing exercise: developing your character. I’ll throw that one in here — along with others — later.
If you have exercises you’d like to suggest, drop them into the comments box below.
