Five quick writing exercises to flex your creative muscles

If you’re stuck for ideas when you sit down to write, creative writing exercises can be a good way to kickstart your imagination.

Even if you feel you have writer’s block or don’t work on a story of your own, this is a way to keep your hand in and practise your craft. Below you’ll find five quick exercises you can do that will help strengthen your writing and flex your creative muscles.

Exercise 1: The six-word story

Let’s have a go at Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story exercise. Hemingway famously wrote ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. It’s such an effective line because it tells us so much in so few words, and allows us to intuit the emotions behind it without directly telling us about them.

Try writing your own six-word story, conveying as much as you can in such a limited amount of space. This makes you concentrate on ‘useful’ and ‘useless’ words in a sentence, which will help you tighten your writing at the self-editing stage.

Exercise 2: The drabble

Let’s kick it up a notch by writing a drabble. If you’ve never heard of drabbles, they’re a form of flash fiction coming in at bang on 100 words. The great thing about drabbles is they can often be the starting point for a short story, building them up in layers until you have a narrative stretching to a few thousand words.

Drabbles, like the six-word story, force you to pare your language back to the bare bones. They make you think about what matters most and how you can avoid being too ‘wordy’ in your writing.

Exercise 3: The stream of consciousness

Some people find this exercise really useful, others not so much. Starting with a blank page, just jot down whatever thoughts come into your head, whether that’s a series of unconnected words or a description of something sitting on the desk in front of you.

Whatever you’re thinking, put the words down. This exercise allows you to open your mind to possibilities, because you never know when inspiration will strike and something in the words you scribble down may leap out at you as the germ of a story.

Exercise 4: The rewrite

This one is a fun way to shake up your writing style. Pick up a book by an author you admire and open it to a random page. Read that page a few times and memorise the content as best you can, then close the book and try to write it out from memory.

This isn’t about imitating your favourite writer, it’s about thinking carefully about their style and making very deliberate word choices you might not normally make. By thinking about how they have shaped their sentences, you pick up on their strengths and how their technique could be applied to your own manuscript at a line level.

Exercise 5: The blog

Whether or not you actually put it online, penning a blog post about something writing related is a handy way of getting over writer’s block or simply getting the creative juices flowing. You could write about anything, be it a post on how you create characters or even how frustrating you find the publishing process.

Whatever topic you choose, the very act of thinking about writing helps you feel you’ve engaged with whatever you’re working on, even if you’re not actively working on it. Blogging can also help build your author profile and attract people to your website, if you have one.

These five exercises are a nice way to get back into writing if you’re stuck for ideas but still want to keep up the writing habit.

For more information on the writing and editing services I provide, please get in touch via the contact form below.