Finding Writing Exercises I Like

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

Writing books and classes are really fond of writing exercises, especially the ones that are intended for classroom use. I hated them for years—to me, they always seemed like a waste of time. I wanted to be attempting to write pay copy, even if my “pay copy” was unsellable. And then I found Ursula le Guin’s writing exercises, and I loved them. Since then, I’ve found more that I like, and many more that I don’t. I’ve also gotten quite a bit of mileage out of some things that weren’t supposed to be writing exercises at all.

What works for me, though, doesn’t work for everyone else, and what works for them often doesn’t work for me. So I thought I’d give some examples and try to explain why they do or don’t work for me. Starting with the ones I dislike.

First is something that isn’t actually a writing exercise, per se: morning pages. Morning pages are three handwritten pages—standard 8-1/2”x11” notebook pages—that you write every morning as stream-of-consciousness what you are thinking. Once you start writing, you’re not supposed to stop until you get three pages of whatever you’re thinking. This is supposed to clear your head of…I don’t know, whatever is in it?…so that you can do some real writing work without all that stuff bothering you.

I find morning pages boring and useless, at best, and counterproductive, at worst. “Getting all that down on paper” just reminds me of all the stuff I have to do/worry about/find out/fix that I wasn’t really thinking about before I started. It doesn’t dump it so I can forget it; it dredges things up that I wasn’t thinking about until I had to come up with three pages first thing in the morning. And yes, I gave them a very fair shot—I did those three blasted pages, handwritten, every morning for a month straight.

Some people swear by them. I’ve no idea why, but if it works for them, it works. So I don’t dis-recommend them. I just complain a lot.

Many of the more traditional writing exercises I dislike are from books intended to be used as textbooks in fiction writing classes. Many follow the format in the following actual example:

“Rewrite a story you have written in the first person by using the first person voice of a different character. What impact does this shift have on plot? Tone? Theme? What do you learn about the story by doing this?”

I dislike this one for a number of reasons: first, writing the same scene from a different character’s viewpoint, is an incredibly obvious thing to try if you’re having POV issues. I didn’t need a writing book to tell me to do this. The equally obvious questions that follow the writing exercise only add to the impression of being condescended to, which gives me hives. (And it’s all just as annoying when other topics use the same format, i.e. “Write *obvious thing to do to practice this technique*. Answer (four to eight obvious questions about what you just learned.)

The worst part though, from my perspective, is that the author of the exercise apparently doesn’t expect the writer to learn anything by actually writing the exercise, only by analyzing it after the fact. The questions are not only obvious, but also deal with things that the author of the exercise seems to assume the writer automatically or intuitively did while performing the exercise, but wouldn’t have noticed or learned from without these questions. I got a lot more out of playing around with viewpoint type in my first four novels (sloppy-omniscient, tight-third person, first-person, multiple viewpoint).

Another book, obviously intended as a writing textbook, has ten to fifteen exercises at the end of each chapter. Each exercise takes the textbook author around half a page to explain. It’s not the exercises themselves that take so much space—they are things like “Describe a flower shop, a bakery, a shoe-repair shop, and any other little store you come across” and “Write a scene of a couple living happily together doing their weekend routine” The rest is prescriptive paragraphs explaining how to go about writing such a scene (“Build toward a dramatic change” “Use fresher language” “Describe the characters’ posture”), and then questions for analyzing it afterward.

For me, these exercises are not only obvious and condescending, but boring—whether I’m reading them or writing them. (It is clear from the additional paragraphs on how to write the exercises that anything I would want to add in the way of characterization, setting, or plot to make these exercises interesting to me as a writer is “not the point of the exercise” and therefore count as distractions to be avoided.)

If I’m going to write an exercise instead of (hopefully) pay copy, I want something that will be fun and interesting to write, something I probably wouldn’t do in an actual story, something that I can learn from by writing it (rather than by analyzing it in detail after).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have found most exercises of this kind in books or articles by people whose primary profession is fiction writing. Ursula le Guin’s book Steering the Craft is the best example I can think of, because it is full of things I would never have thought about trying to do (like “write a grammatical 300-word sentence”). I have, however, also gotten a lot of useful mileage out of using some of the daily prompts for artists that one can find on the web. They’re not pointed at specific writing issues or techniques, but that’s part of what makes them fun and interesting. The ones for artists or doodlers, in particular, have made for some interesting scenelets; among my favorites have been “what you see by starlight,” “family holiday dinner drama,” and “robotic turtles.” I throw my characters in and see what comes out. These rarely make it into a story…but they’re great for unexpected insights into my characters and worlds. And they are a lot of fun.