Writing exercises are great for beginners and seasoned writers alike. Writing is hard. You will often hear advice from prolific writers that you need to write everyday, but sometimes that is not realistic or sustainable. And sometimes that just means writing for fun. These exercises are meant to spark your creativity and flex your writing muscles. Just like weightlifting, you don’t start by lifting a ton of weight, you build up to it. In writing, you don’t necessarily just jump into writing an eight-book, 10 thousand page, series. You build up to it. And just like in weightlifting, sometimes you just need a good warm up.
Use these exercises to hone your writing skills, get your creative juices flowing, and improve your ability as as writer.
- Emphasizing Details
- Look out your window and write for ten minutes about what you see. Include as many details as you can.
- Dialogue
- Think about a conversation you had with someone recently, or a conversation you overheard, and write it down, complete with setting and body language.
- Face your fears
- Write about what scares you the most.
- Comment on Current Events
- Find a magazine or newspaper article, a video, or some other report of a current event, and write down your take.
- Music is Life
- Put on your favorite music and write about where your thoughts take you.
- A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
- Look at your favorite picture or piece of art and write 1000 words about it.
- Do-over
- Think about an incident in your life and write about it. What would you differently if you could do it over again? What would you do the same?
- Letters
- Write a letter to your future self. Where do you expect to be? What do you hope life is like?
- Write a letter to your past self. What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time?
- Acrostic Poem
- Pick a word that has something to do with what is going on in your life right now. For each letter, write a line of poetry, starting with that letter, going into detail about how that word if affecting your life.
- Who would you pick?
- If you could sit down and have a conversation with anyone, who would it be? Write about this interaction.