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Posts from the ‘Writing Exercises’ Category

May 29

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The key to building complex, realistic characters

Ever have one of those “aha” moments in your personal life that just rock your writing world? I love it when this happens.

Recently, while on vacation with my hubby, we were surfing channels late one night and ran across an old rerun of The Odd Couple with Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. The Odd Couple, in case you’re too young to remember, was a sit-com about two men Oscar, the slob, and Felix, the neat freak, and how they live together and drive each other crazy. We watched the episode and laughed more at how corny the show was than the jokes (but the jokes were pretty funny too).

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May 24

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If your boss vomits his bad mood on you, note the details in your journal

Today my boss barfed on me his unhappiness at having to come back from vacation. And of course, as my stomach clenched, I couldn’t help but think about what great material I was getting out of the situation.

As writers, we must suffer for our art. As my blood pressure climbed, I watched how his face turned scarlet – noting what was red from the sunburn he’d brought back from his vacation and what was due to his meltdown. Read more

May 18

Perfecting your first page and other inspiring ideas

Celebrate Friday with these tidbits of writing advice.

In Revealing Character through Details, Julie Eshbaugh at Publishing Crawl explains her philosophy about expressing character details in fiction and includes several examples.

Then, head over to writer and editor Jane Friedman’s blog to read Perfecting Your First Page: Three Tasks or Exercises.

May 10

A letter to writers from John Steinbeck

Does starting a story scare you? Maybe you put off putting pen to paper because of fear. John Steinbeck felt the same way.

In a letter to writers, Steinbeck wrote:

“It is not so very hard to judge a story after it is written, but, after many years, to start a story still scares me to death. I will go so far as to say that the writer who is not scared is happily unaware of the remote and tantalizing majesty of the medium.” Read more

May 3

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Write to your white hot center

In my writing group last night, somebody talked about how as writers we often write around what we really want to say.

Think of your idea, story, or poem as a bright yellow sunflower or maybe a snow-white lily. Around this flower flits a multi-colored butterfly. He dances, darts, and flutters around the flower until he finally hones in and lands.

Writing can be like that. Sometimes, it takes me a while to warm up to what I want to say and that’s okay. Writing is a process of discovery. The key is in the editing after the initial dance of pen and paper. In a poem, I may cut the first stanza or even first half of the poem. In my memoir, the current chapter one is not the chapter one I first wrote. Read more

Apr 30

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Practice the 5-minute “what if?” exercise to enhance your creativity

We’re all born creative thinkers, but sometimes it’s easy to think we aren’t when we’re stuck on a plot or trying to figure out a piece of dialogue for one of our characters.

Part of losing our sense of creativity comes with growing up. When we were kids, we didn’t worry so much about everything having to be logical or correct.

As Michael Michalko says in his book, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, our minds are marvelous pattern recognition machines. We’re taught to see what we think we “should” see. This helps us be more efficient in many ways. But it’s also why we can read through a page of copy multiple times and miss typos. Our brain compensates and “helps” us see the patterns of what we expect to see. Read more

Apr 17

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Four ways to cultivate writerly inspiration

A young woman introduced herself to me at a poetry reading recently. “I write poetry, too,” she said. “But only when the inspiration strikes me.”

Ah, youth. I remember saying the same thing when I was younger.

You see, I’d bought into the myth that writers are a temperamental lot who only write when their muse “inspires” them. Fortunately, I’ve grown as an artist and realize now that the best writers are the ones that cultivate their inspiration daily. They discipline themselves to write each day even when they’re tired or don’t feel like writing. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, inspiration becomes a habit.

How can you cultivate inspiration? Read more

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