What's the best writing exercise you've ever done?

The idea is to encourage finding alternative ways to create lists or conjunctions. It's quite boring to read "I went to the store to buy eggs and milk and bread." But you can spice things up a little along the lines of "Upon entering the store I immediately began heading to the back of the store to collect a gallon of milk. The eggs were my next stop, right next to the dairy section. On the way to the register to check out I passed the bakery where I found the loaf of bread my wife tasked me to find."

An interesting exercise a college professor had one of my classes do once involved turning off the computer monitor and writing without reading what was written. Like writing blind. I think it would be helpful to any writer who gets caught up in their prose and word choices and struggles to get a draft down. It was kind of freeing.

What works best for me is to simply sit down, device-free, and think about a story, the characters, and what the most interesting scenes would be. Another valuable exercise for me is to read a book and not let myself get immersed in the story, but concentrate on how the work was written. So I'm evaluating the decisions the author made and thinking about how I would have done it, and how it could have been written better.

An exercise that I really enjoyed came from a Blogging University Writing 101 course. The exercise involved taking a simple scene and writing it from the point of view of each person in the scene. As I recall, the scene took place in a park. An old lady sits on a bench as a young couple walks past her through the park. It was interesting to write the same scene three different times and see what each character had to say.

in a weird way, TWITTER has helped me with writing. I work REALLY hard to get my points across without using abbreviations.

Mine wasn't for a class. I was working as a writer for an advertising agency. We used to give each other challenges to keep ourselves from becoming bored with what we were doing, so we would issue challenges to each other from a hat draw. I drew a ham and pickle sandwich, so I had a total of six commercials all of which had this fake $300 prop sandwich in it. Was pretty fun and took a lot of creativity to work it in. It was in a Real Estate commercial, a law firm commercial, and a car dealership commercial among others. Again, not a class or a traditional assignment, but was a ton of fun.

I believe everyone (at least my age) played a game in school called telephone or tell a secret. One person would say something in the ear of the next which was passed through each child. The end result bore very remote (if any) semblance of the original secret. As an adult, some friends and I would start a notebook in which one of us would begin a story. Either a word, a sentence, or a paragraph, until the notebook was full or the story was finished. It was interesting to read the different nuances of each writer. I personally found it helpful and truly enjoyed it. I wonder if we could start a thread like that here?

Personally, beta reading for others helped me a lot.

Mary Karr has a great line about writing exercises. Something along the lines of how she never found them helpful, and any kind of prompt would result in her writing "I am Mary, I am sad, the end."

Likewise, I've been in my fair share of workshops, and I've never once done an exercise that has resulted in the production of so much as a finished story. Lord knows it'd be nice if I was able to do that, though.

The only "exercise" I've really found helpful is forcing myself to sit in front of the screen until I have a full page down.

Reading whenever I was able to. Hell I like putting subtitles whenever I watch anything on Netflix just so my brain is aware of how something sounds like in particular. I know that I often come across sentences that I question despite repeating it in my head... Ugh I cannot stress how much that annoys me when I tend to over think.

A writing exercise I like doing for fun is building a story solely based on a conversation between two people. It usually starts out when someone receives a text or message from a stranger. The unknown person sending the text is in need of help, whether it be emotional, or as a life or death situation. It could begin as something as simple as "I'm being hunted by ninjas" or "My sister has been mysteriously disappearing at night". The two strike up a conversation, portraying their personalities in the way they write. Each text is off the top of your head, and even you don't know what happens until the other responds. The plot thickens as you come up with more and more situations where the two people rely on each other's advice, and eventually it turns into a full-blown story. I started doing this way before the game called Lifeline came out, and I was so exited to play the novel-like game because I loved the way it kept you on edge. This writing exercise is sort of like your own personal Lifeline, except you're imagination is in charge, and there are many more possibilities to be discovered.

I recently attended a talk by the writer and activist Mona Eltahawy where she mentioned a very basic writing exercise which someone once taught her. Basically, you start the page with "what I couldn't say " and go from there.
It's so deceptively simple, but I've now used it several times and I keep finding more to say.

From creative writing class recently. Our lecturer gave us each an envelope with hundreds of words on individual little pieces of card. We had to pick ten pairs of two at random, and then see what we could make out of them. Some great stuff came out of that, especially because it was a group discussion, so we could build on others thoughts as well as our own. I got about eight story ideas out of that exercise.

Thank you for all of these great suggestions!

Writing up the text pages of my websites unleashed my ability to transfer story to monitor.

great ideas!

It's not the one that I had the most fun writing for, but it did accidentally give me a publishable work

Write a scenario first as a surprise (the reader doesn't know something, the character(s) might or might not), then re-write the same scenario as a suspense (the reader knows something that some/all of the characters do not).

This was for a Great Course that I could've done at whatever pace I wanted, but I forced myself to do a Tuesday/Thursday schedule (homework for each lecture to be due by noon on the day of the next lecture). I listened to the lecture on Tuesday, and it took me until 11:30 Wednesday night to come up with something to write about, so I planned to jot down a few quick notes to finish in the morning.

Technically, I did Next thing I know, it's 2 in the morning and I have the 1700 word first draft of a story that didn't take a whole lot of editing for me to feel comfortable submitting it (though by then it had grown to 2200 words).

I've found writing out different characters just chatting with each other helps.

As simple as this sounds it really helps if theres something crazily different with them, and if you focus on their perspectives.
Simple alterations include different mindsets, or biases.
So say a cold blooded professional hitman talking to a lady who sells flowers for example. How would that look?
Or take somebody who is seeing things, or a person who has trouble talking (A point very close to home for me. Speech impediment. Gotta love em.)
Even somebody going through a crazy rough patch talking to somebody who isn't or who frankly is a dick about the situation is always something to see. ( Or something you may end up writing.)

But my favourite is to start removing senses, or things that really make them different.
A blind man having a conversation with a lady who has no idea he's blind.
An immortal who can alter reality at a whim talking to a 5 year old girl.
Police chief to a mob boss.
An ex slave talking to a slave trader, (Actually happens in a story of mine.)
Old friends on different sides of the battle field. (Cliche? This feels a bit cliche. Even the old ww1 soldiers thing comes to mind with this one. You know the christmas cease fire.)

I tend to focus on characters, and how they react. I also tend to think of the scenarios which wrap around them. Even if I am not writing this do I do think about it.

The immortal being and the five year old girl one could be amusing. I have a character in my head right now I am imaging doing this.

Sometimes just sitting down and thinking about this crap until a light bulb turns on is enough to get the juices flowing.

I have no formal anything. The only thing close I got was a creative writing class in high school where the teacher just adored my work and I breezed through it with everybody patting me on the back and congratulating me. I learned absolutely nothing from that experience, except maybe I have a chance to go somewhere with it.

So use your noggin and think outside of your box. Bang out a few pages of toss away. You never know when that character you imagined will fit perfectly into a slot in a new story: Just pick em up, brush off the dust, give them a shine, and some more thought.

Just don't stop. Even if you need to write something else because you really feel like writing a scene where somebody is eating an axe for breakfast, go ahead.

I stopped writing for 6 months..

That was the stupidest decision in my life.

Signed,

Mr. James.

I have only recently begun to pursue writing more seriously as a means to an end, and have been exploring various learning resources online. I have a lot of colleagues, friends, and such in higher education, so have had a ton of direction there even without being enrolled in a program.

So, for me a lot of my focus lately has been more on reading and writing exercises. One that I found particularly enjoyable and challenging was the Year End Countdown thread. Mine is here. It made me stick to a schedule (for the most part) for 30 days straight. I'd never done that before, and the effort made me more appreciate the value of writing every day.

I took a creative writing class and we did something that worked really well for me. She set a timer for 30 minutes and told us to start and end a short story in that time. It forced me to fight through my writer's block and actually put something down on paper. I ended up fixing up what I wrote for the excersise into one of my best stories. It might only help me. I'm not sure.

Holly Lisle's "plotting under pressure" index card exercise works wonders for me! You take a stack of index cards and just jot down a list of as many scene ideas as you can think of. Any scene you'd like to write. They don't have to relate to each other. The fun part is when you're finished. You sift through the note cards, moving them around to see if any scenes would cause conflict/stakes when put side by side. I'm sure I'm not explaining it half as well as she does, but I love doing it!

'Writing the Breakout Novel' by Donald Maass, once you have a full manuscript.
He breaks down everything - chapters, characters, character development, plot and subplot development, relationships - and has you put it back together like IKEA furniture. Frustrating at times but very very helpful for a total newbie like me. It made me question why I was writing, what my idea was etc. Tension is the key word - you want to raise tension in and among your characters by slow degrees.
He also does workshops but the book is based on workshop so give it a try. Good luck.

Soraya said:

'Writing the Breakout Novel' by Donald Maass, once you have a full manuscript.

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Love it. The first writing craft book I had to buy after abusing the library's for so long.

One of my favorites was this:

Write five paragraphs, of five sentences each. In each paragraph, describe the same scene using a different sense; use a sensory description in every sentence.

(So your first paragraph is five sentences, and every sentence describes the scene visually. Etc.)

Then choose one sentence from each paragraph and use them to construct a final paragraph which describes the scene using all five sentences.

I find this helps me vary the ways I describe things, so it's not all visual or auditory.

Write or rewrite a scene - a short one - using only nouns, real verbs and a few "glue words" such as "The" and prepositions.

No adjectives, no adverbs, no -ing forms.

It forces you into tight consideration of your word choices.

There are so many great suggestions in this thread...I know I will use some, as sometimes my writing well seems to run dry. I do have one small suggestion to contribute -- I like to pick up the book nearest my right elbow, open it at random, put my finger on a page, and write down the word my finger touches. I do this three times, and challenge myself to write a paragraph incorporating those three words. Repeat as needed.