Archive - MacAllen's Theater GUide

Writing Exercises

Whether you are looking to get started writing fiction for the first time or are an experienced author suffering from acute writer’s block, practice and exercising your writing skills is important. There are many methods and by no means should the selection here be considered finite or absolute. Different people will benefit from different exercises.

News Clips

Inspiration for stories can come from a wide range of sources, but there is nothing quite like drawing on actual events. Select at random three newspaper articles. From the first article, take the setting or location. From the second article, take the occupation of the people or person involved in the news story. Finally, use a person from the third article as the basis for your main character, hero or villain. With three unrelated events, develop a short story.

The purpose of this exercise is to force the writer to think on the fly about ideas that may not have occurred to the writer previously. Many times this will help generate a new and different concept. The benefit of fiction of course is that the writer is free from the restraint of reporting real events.

Title Poaching

Browse over you bookshelf, or if you happen not to own any books, visit your local bookstore. Take the first word from the title of every book on the shelf (excluding articles like the) and work them into a short or sketch. For instance, if your bookshelf had Pride and Prejudice, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Tender is the Night, and Slaughterhouse Five, the words you would choose would be "Pride, Island, Tender, Slaughterhouse". By constraining creativity with certain rules, writers often can come up with new ideas that otherwise would never surface.

Out to Lunch

Often, writers will attempt to force themselves into writing when perhaps they have stressed themselves to the point where they achieve writer’s block. Taking a break for lunch is not only fulfilling, but can also be an exercise in itself. While eating your lunch, list vertically all the ingredients of your meal (bread, turkey, cheese, mayonnaise, lettuce, cola). This exercise is very simple: you will think of a word that begins with every letter of the ingredients you use and then use those words for a story. Essentially you are creating one word, nonsense acrostic poems for the food you use in your lunch. In addition to random words, confine each ingredient to a different category. For example, 'bread' must be different places, ‘turkey’ must be adverbs, ‘cheese’ must be objects, ‘mayonnaise’ must be adjectives and so on.

The Idea Box

Every time you think of an interesting phrase, thought, or idea, write it down on an index card. Underline a word on the card and file the card in a box alphabetically. The next time you are short on ideas, randomly draw a card from your box and go with the idea. This exercise of course, takes preparation in advance.

A Picture is Worth…

Pictures are worth a thousand words. So find a painting or a photograph and describe it in a short sketch of a thousand words. The object of this exercise is to get the writer writing. Often the mere act of writing or typing is a method for warming up the brain. Don’t hesitate to stop writing about the picture if you feel like you are back on track for writing a story.