For the Uninspired Writers: Writing Exercises to Challenge Your Imagination & Technique

Six writing exercises to generate ideas for your story & improve writing

There are books full of prompts and writing exercises all over the internet for generating ideas and improving our writing, and yet none of them feel intimate enough, specific enough to what writers are trying to build. How do we create our training montages for the mind, our inspiration sessions, our greatest creative moments? It starts with building up our skills, but how? 

We are told to write everyday, but besides dropping random words on a page until you get something extraordinary [moments that are exceedingly rare], most writers are often stuck in a cycle of comfortability. There is a better way to reach our writing goals. Or rather, a more effective way. There are many prompts out there, but some are more effective than others. Prompts that stimulate the imagination and not push us further from it. 

Writing is more than just writing. It is our critical eye, our empathy, our ability to tell interesting stories, our knowledge of literature and the things we’ve read. It’s our knowledge of how to write creatively from a very fundamental level with foundational writing techniques and tools. All of these things require time and patience. How do we go beyond writing aimlessly to intentionally? Let’s explore exercises and prompts that can help open our world as writers. 

Exercise: Write the same idea in 10 different sentences.

Goal: Increase writing technique.

This is a technical exercise, pushing you to explore rhythm, structure, grammar, and how you can say things in so many ways. This allows you to analyze which sentence has a certain effect on you as a reader, and decide if that is how you wanted to say it. Once we know our story, it will never matter if we cannot articulate it to have the impact we want. Structure and sentence is often under-looked at times, so this is a way to get us back to the nuts and bolts of writing.

Choose an idea for a sentence of something happening, and write it in ten different ways. 

Prompt: Write about something you couldn’t do in real life, but wanted to. [Free-write]

Goal: Stretch the imagination in storytelling. 

This is a free-writing prompt to explore the fantasies of alternate realities in your own life. The exciting, confusing, or the unimaginable. Stretch your imagination to dream up your wildest potential experiences that were avoided because “real life” got in the way, or because you just simply made a different choice. 

It is in these possibilities that you activate the part of your mind that is dormant with a predominant logical thinking culture, the part that can do whatever it wants. 

Put on some nice music, get comfortable in your writing area, and write freely without thinking for at least 10 minutes. 

Recommendation: Write out an intention to receive a stream of new ideas the night before a writing session. 

Exercise: Create the plot points. 

Goal: Enhance your writing through the usage of the plot device. 

Finish plot points for a short story with the first line: “He was waiting to get onto the stage.” 

This will help develop our sense of what is actually happening in the narrative. This is a fundamental building block of any writer who wants to get back to basics, and understand how different events and when/how they happen can affect the feeling and flow of the story. 

You can create several sets of plot points with this one line, taking the story in different directions every time. [Or you can choose any one line that intrigues you, and build plots off of that.]

Spend at least 30 minutes on this exercise. 

Exercise: Edit the first chapter of any story you have. 

Goal: Improve developmental editing skills to create the best versions of your work. 

Revising and editing are arguably some of the most important aspects of developing your work into something readable and intentional. One should still prioritize an editor you trust, but editing yourself to get it as close to completion as possible is an essential skill as a writer. If you have a longer work you’ve been working on, this is the perfect way to revisit the story and/or revamp it entirely.

Revisions and edits can be limitless, but some of the most basic edits include rearranging sentence structures, adding/taking out words, readjusting literary elements like character or theme, or getting closer to the original goal of the project. Developmental editing is really about bringing the experience together, so every change should get you closer to that initial intention, or to a discovery of something new while in the process. 

Begin edits and revisions for just the first chapter. Edit it at least 10 times, noting the changes along the way. What this will do is show the parts of the narrative that are needed, and the ones that are not. It can even open up things you didn’t know about the story at first, pushing you to research things you didn’t before, make sentences stronger and more intentional, find the center and “point” of the narrative. 

Some other impressive effects of this particular exercise are the amount of ideas this generates alone for the rest of the work. You’ll be surprised at how easy it becomes to approach the rest of the work once the first chapter feels complete and whole.

Exercise: Recycle old work for new creative exploration. 

Goal: Stretch the imagination and increase adaptability in editing. 

Use line(s) that you had to take out of a previous work and use them as the first line or paragraphs of a new short story. 

This shows you the magic of not only writing, but revision. That the same sentence can be manipulated to serve a different purpose. Using it in a different context like this will also engage the imagination and improve editing skills. 

Spend at least 20 minutes creating a short story with the new line(s). 

Exercise: Take 3-5 literary techniques and write with them. 

Goal: Increase technique through the use of literary tools, and understanding of why certain things work and others don’t.

Choose three to five literary techniques of choice and write one paragraph using a literary technique as the focus. Each technique will be the primary tool to execute the idea/events/moods of the paragraph. [Any topic of choice is fine].

With this method, we are practicing some things we don’t know as writers, and discovering things we’ve done but had no name for them. This is key to developing our foundation, and it’s probably the easiest exercise to start with. 

Recommendation: The most recent copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms is your friend. 

Exercise: Annotate your books. [Honorary Mention]

Goal: Understand the structure intimately of some of your favorite works. 

Get your highlighters, post-its, and sit with a book for at least an hour to annotate. 

Annotating is an interaction with the text, finding literary elements and themes, forming your opinions, and discovering the unique narrative structure and insights in the book as you read. This improves how we interact with our own text as well, and could potentially spark ideas for our own work. This is because we are absorbing more of the nuances of the text by spending extra time with this form of complex note-taking. 

Recommendation: Buy annotated copies of literary texts.

Last Words

Some things to know about these exercises and prompts is that there are a plethora of them. In books, blogs, and from your writing friends and from your own writing experiences. The most important thing to know about them is that you should do some form of writing, exercises, or prompts everyday [and other things in your process as an artist] . That is the key. Without consistency, your writing muscles will never form. Writing exercises may not be the only way to improve, but they allow a bit of detachment that every writer needs when it comes to breaking our own glass ceilings.

However and wherever you write where you feel sexy, relaxed, and inspired, here’s to expanding our writing everyday. Here’s to thriving for my writers and storytellers. 

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Tag: writing exercises