By voluntarily pushing yourself into a box, you will force yourself to master your space, and once you master that very tiny space, you can enlarge your territory bit by bit until you re back in the swing of things. By the time you ve written all four stories you ll be anxious to incorporate some of what your characters in the exercise are doing into your most recent work. Maybe you ll take one of the individuals and continue with his or her story, and use the exercise as a synopsis. Or, use it as nothing more than a way to loosen up your imagination. The important thing is that you didn t lose your writing abilities because you used your writing abilities and made them work for you.
Writers are sensitive individuals.
You can always go back and change it. A blank page is a page that hasn t been touched by creativity. A page that has writing on it, even if it s not perfect, is a page that you alone created, with characters and situations that you alone could put together. You are in control. You are the master of your characters.