Add Writing Exercises to Your Writing Routine
Published
By Kelley J. P. Lindberg
A lot of non-writers assume writers are born with the fully formed, innate ability to evoke atmosphere from a few well-chosen details, depict a character’s growth arc without unnecessary tangents, and craft a taut, suspenseful scene with words that perfectly capture all the characters’ motivations, conflicts, and passions at once.
If only we were born with that magic ink in our veins.
Instead, building up our writing skills is like building up our bodies’ physical muscles. It takes hard work and a lot of time, and it involves a reasonably dedicated routine of learning, practice, and repetition until we begin to see progress in our skillset.
One way to help build up our muscles is by doing exercises that target smaller, isolated muscle groups (like biceps or dialogue, for example) as well as exercises that target larger, foundational muscle groups (like core muscles or character motivation, say).
Choosing a writing career means choosing a lifelong pursuit of learning. We can never stop polishing our chosen craft, honing our skills, and trying new techniques or we risk growing stagnant. In writing, no one ever reaches the point where they say, “Okay, now I’m a perfect writer. I don’t need to learn anything else.” If they do, I’m pretty sure they’re lying. And they’re losing readers.
Even the most successful authors find themselves floundering in occasional bouts of self-doubt, growing bored, or wishing they could produce something shinier, bolder, or more complex than their last book.
Writing exercises are a great way to stretch and improve our writing skills in small, bite-sized moments. What you draft in a writing exercise might be related to your larger work-in-progress, or it might be something out of the clear blue sky. Honestly, it doesn’t matter, because all writing—even throw-away pieces—strengthen your skillset. The goal of an exercise is to flex your writing muscles in new ways and develop new strengths, not to produce a publication-worthy final product. Exercises are private, personal, and commitment-free, making them a great way to elevate your writing with zero pressure to be “perfect.”
I have writing friends who do a short writing exercise every morning, usually drawing from books on writing craft, before launching into their novel. Some try exercises to break out of “writer’s block.” Some do it as a palate-cleanser when their novel is stuck and their brain needs a quick break. Some critique groups start each meeting with a 10-minute writing exercise before beginning their critiques.
As for myself, I attend Deb Courtney’s monthly online Write Drunk, Edit Sober sessions https://pikespeakwriters.org/events/, sponsored by Pikes Peak Writers, where Deb starts each session with a micro-lesson about a particular writing skill, then gives us four prompts to write about in 10-minute bursts. I love these exercises, because it makes my brain think about storytelling in different ways. Some of Deb’s prompts have sparked scenes that ended up in my work-in-progress. Others will never find their way into a story, but they were good for a laugh, a gasp, or a thought-provoking moment at the time, and they boosted my approach, confidence, and skills a little bit more.
If adding writing exercises to your writing routine sounds like a quick, relatively painless way to keep advancing your writing chops, good for you! One approach may be to identify what you feel are areas you’d like to strengthen, then look for exercises that target that skill. Or you might find a book that leads you organically through a spectrum of exercises to build your overall repertoire of skills.
There are many types of writing exercises and many places to find them: books, websites, email newsletters, even my own website (www.KelleyLindberg.com), where I post a new writing prompt once or twice a month.
Want to get started? I humbly submit three exercises to prime your pump:
- Dialogue: Write a scene of dialogue between two people who just witnessed a robbery in a convenience store. One is the clerk who was robbed. The other is a customer who was hidden behind the potato chips. The robber has fled, and these two characters are waiting for the cops to arrive. What do they talk about? Can you make their voices different enough that we don’t need tags (he said, she said) to tell them apart? Is one still nervous, while the other is exhilarated, or nauseated, or feeling vengeful? Make the dialogue (voice, vocabulary, speech patterns) show us the differences between the two characters.
- Setting: Describe a spooky setting without using obvious words like “spooky,” “scary,” “haunted,” or “terrifying.” Choose two or three details in the setting to focus on and describe them in a way that makes us see just how scary this place might be.
- Character: Write a short scene where your character has won $10 million in a lottery. How do they react? What do they spend their first million dollars on? That can tell us a lot about their values, behaviors, and emotions.
Want more? Here are some books with writing exercises and prompts to explore:
- Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, by Bret Anthony Johnston, ed.
- What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter https://www.amazon.com/What-Writing-Exercises-Fiction-Writers/dp/0062720066/ref=sr_1_1
- Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, by Roy Peter Clark
- The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises that Transform Your Fiction, by Brian Kiteley
- The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the Story Within, by Alan Watt
- Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (For Aspiring Writers), by Natalie Goldberg. (my novelist friends say the exercises help with their fiction, too, not just for memoirs)
- And here are a few online places to find writing exercises and prompts:
Do you have a favorite source for writing exercises? Share your suggestions in the Comment section below. And congratulations on starting your new writing-fitness program. Your writing muscles are already looking more buff!
Kelley J. P. Lindberg writes YA and adult fiction, magazine articles, essays, and how-to books. Her fiction and essays have appeared in literary magazines such as The Baltimore Review, Wilderness House Review, and The Citron Review, in anthologies including Pikes Peak Writers’ Journeys into Possibility, and in the Tellables app for Amazon Alexa. When she isn’t writing, she’s traveling as far and as often as she can. Visit her at www.KelleyLindberg.com or follow her on BlueSky, X-Twitter, and Instagram at @KelleyLindberg1.
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