Five of My Favorite Writing Exercises
By: Christina Dalcher
Tags: Creativity, Writing Tips, Writing, Fiction, Writers Block

Five of My Favorite Writing Exercises

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

I’m going to whisper two dirty words in your ear:

Writer’s block

We all face it. It hits beginning writers and successful novelists. It hits Stephen King (just consider his novel Misery). We sit down to a blank screen and wonder how we’re going to fill it. The following tips might result in complete stories, or they might serve as practice runs. How they work for you isn’t important, but I hope they jump-start your writing whenever you feel like you need that extra little push.

Writing is imagination. It’s experimentation. It’s conjuring something from nothing.

1. Practice your spy game

Listen to the woman in line behind you at the coffee shop, the kid bagging your groceries, a neighbor you don’t know very well, anyone. Look carefully at your friend’s jewelry, a stranger’s shoes, the art hanging on a wall in your dentist’s office. What might these words or objects reveal? What stories could they tell?

Remember, this is fiction, so you don’t want to reveal any personal information about the individuals who inspire your story. The idea is to create something new from a mere glimpse — to imagine how a turn of phrase is part of a broader context, to wonder about the sentimental value of an opal pendant. There’s no reason to ask for further information from your unwitting subject; let your mind do the work.

Example

Our good friends visited one evening for dinner, and I noticed the woman had on a silver toe ring. (Additional information: the couple was from New York, but were living in a southern town, so think pearls instead of toe rings!) From that single piece of jewelry, I imagined a story about not quite fitting in, wearing the wrong clothes and playing the wrong music, and ultimately upping sticks and returning home. “The New Yorkers of Tidewater” practically wrote itself.

2. Begin after the finish line

Flash fiction requires big ideas in small spaces. We don’t have time to recount all the events or backstory. My advice? Skip to finish line and forget the race itself. Talk about the aftermath, not what led to it (at least, not directly). Show us a character who is dealing with the consequences of an event without explicitly stating what happened.

Perhaps your main character is recently widowed. There’s no need to spell that out in words when you can describe the widow’s actions. What does she do with all those casseroles the mourners brought over? How does she go about sifting through her husband’s closet? Focus on the minute behaviors that tell the story in such detail your readers will fill in the white space. They’ll learn not only what happened, but about the character herself.

Other events (which you won’t speak of directly!) might be:

A dinner party that went badly

An argument between siblings

A disastrous accident

Example

One writing prompt from a workshop asked us to sketch a character who was in the process of putting things in order and making sense of chaos. We were directed to not explicitly discuss what happened before, only to show the character’s subsequent behavior. My story, which I eventually titled “Out, Spot,” described a woman in a cleaning frenzy. At first, it appeared she was merely scrubbing away at random objects, but as the 400-word story progresses, it becomes clear she’s struggling to forget a fatal car accident that she caused.

3. Grow a word garden

This is one of my favorite exercises from a workshop I took with Kathy Fish some years back. It works especially well for those of us who sometimes struggle with bringing our passive vocabulary (words we know, but seldom use) to the surface. But that’s not all — starting a story with a mess of unrelated words can take our writing in unexpected directions, forcing us out of comfortable shells.

Start with a story you wrote yourself or a story by someone else. Now skim over it and pull out five words that resonate with you. Try not to think about it too much; let your subconscious do the work. When you’ve got your five words, write them each on a separate sheet of paper.

Now for the fun part: for every word, come up with ten additional words and scribble them down like petals surrounding the starting point. They don’t need to be synonyms or even closely related. ‘Smoke,’ for instance, might lead you to think of ‘fire,’ but it could just as easily generate something like ‘obscure’ or ‘suffocation.’ When you’re finished, you’ll have five pages with ten fresh words on each.

Final step? Go through the pages one at a time, circling only one of the petals in every ‘word flower.’ Again, pick them without over-analyzing. Use these final five items (all five of them!) in a brand new story. Who knows where it will lead!

Example

I began with a piece of flash fiction I’d previously published, and ended up with this list of words:

foam, pop, engorge, liquify, spray

There were so many water images, I knew the story setting needed to be the ocean. I broke out of my comfort zone and wrote a fun piece about an old man getting back on his surfboard and called it “One Last Endless Summer.”

4. Stop and ask questions

Actually, you only need to ask one question: What if? While at the first Flash Fiction Festival in Bath, England a few years ago, I took a workshop with Pamela Painter. Her advice has stuck in my mind ever since. Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser, pausing to think about what might happen next opens up the imagination. Remember, just because you’ve plotted out your story doesn’t mean you’re beholden to the plan. And if you write by the seat of your pants (as I often do), you’ll spend plenty of time staring at the page wondering what happens next.

Try this: As soon as you’ve hit a key event in your story, stop writing. Take a few breaths, do some yoga, grab a snack. Then come back to the page and brainstorm five different ways to continue. The technique is similar to growing your word garden, but instead of lexical items we’re expanding the world of possible events.

Suppose your story involves a character who has recently purchased an antique desk. There’s a piece of paper stuck inside. Your writer’s mind has already decided it’s a love letter from fifty years ago, and that’s fine. But there’s no harm at in stopping to consider a few other options:

What if you show the letter to your spouse, but he or she only sees a blank piece of paper?

What if when you pry the paper out, it begins to disintegrate?

What if the paper is a scrap from a newspaper dated 100 years in the future?

What if on the paper are two words: “Help me”?

Example

I’ve now used this technique so often, I can’t even remember the specific stories or novels where I’ve played the What if? game. What I do know is I’ve sometimes stuck with my original plotline, other times changed it, and still other times have generated a brand new story idea.

5. Creating plots from events

Aristotle, in his Poetics, says, ”The plot is the essential element of a tragedy….The plot does not concern what has happened as an isolated incident.”

Consider a single event, say, a man jumping out of a window (Chinquee, 2009). At first, this might sound like your story’s plot, but it’s merely an event. To develop a plot, we need to ask questions.

Who is the man?

Where is the man?

Is he rich? Poor? Famous? Lonely? Sane?

Is he suicidal, or is he a stunt man?

Who else might be in the house? Wife? Child? Wheelchair-bound father?

In other words, we need to recognize how all the other things surrounding the event are the real deal. So try this: pick a mundane event like Woman goes dress shopping or Student cheats on an exam. Write five completely different paragraph-long stories centering on the event you chose. Notice how the event remains the same, but the plot doesn’t.

Example

A woman goes dress shopping, same as every Saturday. She tries on bold prints and strappy sundresses, things she’ll never wear because there’s no place to wear them. She goes home, dreaming of next Saturday when, for a few hours, she can pretend she’s someone else. Her husband is a cheat, and so she goes dress shopping. Her therapist says, “Lure him back.” She comes home with armfuls of frocks, stashes them in the closet, and smiles as she slides the stolen credit card back into her husband’s wallet.

Okay — I wrote these on the fly, but I think you see the point. In each, we have a woman going dress shopping. But how different the circumstances are!

The take-home message

Writing is imagination. It’s experimentation. It’s conjuring something from nothing. In short, writing is hard work. Whether you’re stuck on the initial idea or hit a roadblock halfway through your story, consider trying one of these exercises and seeing where it takes you. I have a feeling the final destination will be an interesting one.

References

Chinquee, K. 2009. The Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. (Tara L. Masih, Ed.). Rose Metal Press.