Best exercises for writing workshops

I've been in about three different workshops. The one on viewpoint was excellent because we took the same scene from a story and rewrote it in all the different viewpoints, and even tried doing it from different characters. You have to embrace it to benefit--won't help if you just change I to George and call it a change in type of viewpoint.

One that was less successful was a description one. That one started out with using fantasy subjects, which created problems for the non-fantasy writers. The exercises were writing descriptions of different things, such as a setting or a character and using the five senses in a single passage. For a lot of the writers, it became more of a checklist of items to get into the description rather than thinking about what the story needed at that point. If it'd been doing it, I'd have had excercises like, "Describe something unusual about your character"; "Describe a character or setting with a single line of dialogue"; and "Use smell to establish a mood in your setting."

I took a writing class that structured itself as one big ten week long workshop, and that was probably my favorite workshop I've ever participated in. It was great. For the first few weeks the teacher would give us a short story to read or a part of a novel or something and there would be some lesson about the story, like, "oh this is in a strange point of view," or "this story is written in a close psychic distance," or "this includes magical realism." Things like that. Sometimes it was genre stuff, but usually it was setting/pacing/POV stuff. Then, she'd send us home and we'd have to write a two page scene that includes the lesson for the day or rework a previous assignment to include the new lesson. We'd bring them in the next day and a few people would read theirs out loud and the rest of us who didn't have time to read put our stuff on the message boards. Every person was assigned two buddies each assignment and you'd go online and post one compliment and one suggestion for each of your buddies.

At the end of the quarter, we each had to write a 10-25 page story, print 30 copies, and pass them out in class. Every single person wrote a 3 page critique about your story. It was pretty brutal. Then there was a 20 minute discussion about your work. There was no defending your work or answering questions until the very end. Our final project was to turn in a "significant revision" of our story. The critiques and discussion did wonders for my writing. I'm taking the class again next quarter at a higher level. I'm pretty excited.

We did a lot of fun little activities that I feel helped somehow, even if they just broke the ice a little. We did that two lies and a truth game, but instead of just guessing the truth, we interrogated the person about what we thought were the lies and they were forced to make up believable back stories on the spot or be revealed as a liar. I thought that was fun.

We'd also do this thing where the teacher would say, "The first line of your story is [insert ridiculous line here] and the last line is [insert twice as ridiculous line here]. You have thirty minutes. Incorporate [insert lesson here]. Go." I always ended up with something interesting out of those.

We used a book called "Behind the Short Story: From First Draft to Final" by Ryan G. Van Cleave and Todd James Pierce. It's full of short stories and activities. I recommend it.

I did a fun activity once where we had to interview another class member and then write a short story based on their experience from their point-of-view. Then we got to see how close we came to reproducing the experience. It was a lot of fun and it was interesting to see the details people would add in and how sometimes they were spot on and sometimes they weren't. I don't know if it would be particularly useful, but it was one of the more fun things we ever did in my writing classes.

I put on a small writers' workshop every year and also help with the Emerald City Writers Conference. We have workshops taught by pros in the field on everything from Career to Craft to Publishing and other special topics.

If for some reason you do not want to lead the workshop, you can always put out a call for proposals for topics and have a guest speaker come in. We have over 50 workshops at our annual event and they are either an hour or two hours in length. Some are hands-on.

What kind of workshop are you thinking you might like? Maybe I can give you some ideas.

Another Editor said:

Thanks for all your responses. These all sound like classes, or programs of instruction for an entire course. I am looking for workshops that can be done in a single sitting of two hours or less. I would appreciate hearing about exercises along those lines that some of you have participated in; both good and bad, and how they were done.

Thanks again.

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I did an excellent workshop with Jack Grapes, who teaches "Method Writing" in Los Angeles. He is an amazing teacher.

We did what he called his "Pyramid exercise." Basically, most people sit down with an idea of what they are going to write and start expanding from their first sentence. He has you turn it upside down. For the first couple of paragraphs, you try to make every sentence completely different and unrelated to the others - maybe a bit of dialogue, maybe an image, maybe a memory... but try not to connect them. This part of the exercise was guided by the instructor. Then we were given about fifteen or twenty minutes to write a couple more pages and to ultimately tie most of it together. People came up with REALLY good pieces.

Most people were writing personal essays or memoir. I think the exercise can work with fiction, but might need to be tweaked.

Another exercise I've done with this teacher is using dice. You can do this any number of ways. He does it with different voices, so that 1=flowery, 2=slangy, 3=abstract, etc... You could do different things for the numbers, though - the possibilities are endless, really.

I was at a conference last year that had hour-long workshops.

The one I enjoyed most was prompt-inspired. The workshop leader brought in a bag of little things she'd picked up at Goodwill: a tiny woven basket, a funky candle, a bronze Buddha, an old photograph in a carved frame, etc.

We participants picked an item from the bag, and held it for a few minutes in our hands, in silence. Then, we were to imagine the person who owned the piece, to imagine their connection to it, how it fit into their life. Then we wrote from that person's viewpoint.

Several participants read their work out loud for the class. It was a very enjoyable, non-threatening experience.