Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a sewing class for beginners. In the first class, they showed us how to work the sewing machines and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could see how to guide stuff through the feed. I waited until the teacher was gone and then started my actual project; I didn’t see any point in sewing paper, when I already knew from the demo how the whole thing was supposed to work.
Alright, the seam was maybe a little more wobbly than it might have been, but it wasn’t bad enough to have to rip out, and it wasn’t even as bad as the worst one that somebody who’d been practicing all day with the paper did. And the second seam was better. Alright, maybe I’d have done a better job on the first seam if I’d spent time sewing paper first. But comparing the incremental benefit of the pointless paper-sewing with the amount of emotional annoyance it’d have caused me, I’m still glad I went straight to the material.
I’m the same way when it comes to writing exercises, for the most part. The vast majority of them seem to me to be the equivalent of sewing paper with a dull needle – they’re meant to teach one very specific thing: Dialog. Viewpoint. Voice. Description. Outlining. But when you’re actually writing a story, you aren’t every doing just one thing at a time. A scene may be mostly dialog, but it’s from a particular viewpoint with a particular voice; the dialog will also display the personalities of each of the characters, and probably some background, and probably at least a smidgen of plot movement. Writing is a juggling act, and you can’t really learn how to juggle if you only ever use one ball at a time.
Having taught writing classes, I’ve seen what happens when a would-be writer has gotten too focused on exercises. One gets stories that focus on one thing at a time: first, an opening “hook”; then a lump of description; then some dialog (often with the bare minimum of labeling); then some physical activity. You can practically draw lines across the page between exercises. And it’s really hard to get people to stop doing this, once they’ve gotten into the habit.
On the other hand, there’s a difference between getting exercise and doing an exercise. Many people – and I am one of them – need to take an hour or so several times a week to do some walking or biking or weight lifting, because their everyday lives are sedentary and don’t get them moving enough for them to stay healthy. For my farmer uncles and cousins, however, going to the gym to lift weights after a day of shoveling manure and lifting hay bales would be … overkill, redundant, and unnecessary. They get plenty of exercise from their regular lives without ever having to do an exercise.
Which is why I contend that writing exercises are great for some people, some of the time … and a terrible idea for other people, some of the time. If you know you have something specific you need to work on, like keeping to viewpoint or working description into a scene, then doing an exercise that’s focused on that particular thing can really be helpful. If you’ve been writing for a while and suddenly find yourself needing to know how to do something you’ve never tried before, a targeted exercise or two can help get you up to speed in a hurry. And there are exercises (the only ones I actually enjoy, myself) that challenge the writer to do things they’d never do in a story or chapter, like writing 300 words without using any punctuation, or writing a 250-word scene in complete sentences (no fragments) of seven words or less).
The key is diagnosis. If you are doing a lot of writing, and the writing you’re doing is varied, you’re probably getting enough “exercise.” If you notice that you’ve written three chapters with no dialog at all, or no description to speak of, well, maybe a few dialog or description exercises would help target that particular muscle group…er, writing difficulty.
And of course, if writing exercises are your idea of fun, go for it.
I like the comparison – especially the bit about farmers not needing to go to the gym. I’m with you on the paper sewing. Yes, it might teach me something but I find that sort of thing so boring I’d learn very little from the exercise.
O evil! I’d never even considered that possible result. Vic Frankenstein’s Guide to Great Writing – and it doesn’t even have to be written to be read. Horror indeed…
Actually, at least one recommended way of learning to juggle does involve starting with a single ball. The idea is that you practise throwing it in a consistent arc until your hands and arms do it by themselves: muscle memory, I guess. Then when you introduce a second ball, you have less to think about: your hands take care of the basic mechanics while your brain takes care of the more complicated bits.
I tried that method of learning to juggle, but I never got past ball two. (I didn’t practice consistently, though.)
One place that I find writing exercises helpful is if I’m stuck on a scene or chapter. In those cases, it’s a matter of trying to get my brain out of a rut so it can make new connections.
My favorite writing exercises are making spiderweb outlines, and coming up with a situation in which my character acts in a way opposite of their normal characteristics without breaking character. (That second exercise is one I found in Donald Maast’s Breakout Novel Workbook.)
I don’t think I could’ve learned to write by doing writing exercises, though. You learn to write by writing. 🙂
I am currently taking part in an (experimental) class that involves exercises, and once more found out that I absolutely *cannot* write on command. I need _story_, or at least _story possibilities_ – a character or two, a situation, goals and obstacles and something I want to write about.
I also still cannot do camera-eye description. I need a character to interact with the environment, and you’ll get them, and their thoughts, *and* their actions. This probably means I ought to practice this, or at least practice description from photographs. (A photo already tells a story – you have a mood, a viewpoint, and an implied narrative in that it will draw your eye here and there. You wonder why did the photographer show me _this_ – what’s outside the frame? Why did they pick this POV?)
In other (but not unrelated) news: I think I’ve grokked how to write short stories. Well, _a particular type_ of short story. It only took forever…
NotACat, all I’d learn from throwing one ball would be to throw one ball. Not to be ready to catch-and-throw – to always perform the moves in one particular order. Adding a second ball would *completely* break me – only then I’d have to unlearn one habit and learn another, and the habit-to-be-unlearnt was far too close to the one I would seek to acquire…
I also was completely incapable of learning to fence in slow motion. SloMo was a separate skill, and I was far too busy trying to learn to fence to have brainspace for anything else.