27 Creative Writing Exercises That’ll Punch Up Your Writing
Creative writing sporting events are a notable way to educate your writing muscle groups. Ready to flex? Read on.
Wouldn’t you like to damage your content material out of the hoop whenever?
To constantly land that knockout blow, much like your writing idols?
Imagine having the same audience of cheering enthusiasts, clamoring to read your subsequent post (or to buy your first e-book as a posted writer).
Yep. That’s the dream, alright.
But permit’s face truth. When you sit down down to write new content material, it in no way pretty measures up to the greats. (How do they make it look so smooth?)
You’d love to write down just like the heavyweight blogging champions that inspired you to start a weblog within the first vicinity, but proper now you sense greater just like the puny man on the punching bag. You may also as nicely take hold of any other soda and flop in the front of the TV.
But don’t throw in the towel simply but.
You might not write like the ones running a blog champions now, but that doesn’t suggest you by no means will. If you workout your writing muscle mass, you can also make cash running a blog and turn out to be one of the greats.
How to Exercise Your Writing Muscles and Become a Blogging Heavyweight
Exercise. (Groan.) Who wishes it?
You do. We all do.
If you want to be physically in shape, you need to workout your body. And in case you need to supply effective, punchy content, you need to exercise your writing muscles. It’s a no-brainer.
But that doesn’t mean you just write every day without any education routine.
Sure, every day writing exercise might get you there sooner or later, however creative writers and copywriters will exercising with precision.
Free Writing Class: A Cheat Sheet for Becoming a Freelance Writer, Starting from Scratch
They will take 15-half-hour each day to teach specific skills. And they received’t simply teach as soon as and suppose they’re finished. They will go again and educate the same writing skill time and again, till they have got it down pat.
That’s the way you need to approach the writing pointers beneath.
When you do them for the primary time, you may sense clumsy and unnatural. But after a few weeks of hard paintings, you’ll fast note a distinction.
That’s how exercise works.
Ready to get started out?
Then put down that soda, buddy. We’re going to the writing gymnasium!
27 Creative Writing Exercises (Broken Down through Category)
7 Writing Exercises That’ll Make You Fearless within the Writing Ring
6 Writing Exercises That’ll Get Your Writing Style in Perfect Shape
2 Writing Exercises That’ll Give Your Writing a Hilarious Left Hook
four Writing Exercises That’ll Beef Up Your Scene-Painting Skills
three Writing Exercises That’ll Make You Pack a More Persuasive Punch
five Writing Exercises That’ll Strengthen Your Creative Muscles
7 Writing Exercises That’ll Make You Fearless within the Writing Ring
Most writers hold again when they write. They’re afraid to open up and display all of themselves, terrified they’ll be rejected or ridiculed. And if it’s a paid writing challenge for a purchaser? Forget about it. It’s a recipe for author’s block and gazing a blank page.
The maximum effective writers are fearless. They bleed the whole lot they have onto the web page, making people wince, gasp, sob or seethe. Their writing connects on a deep stage due to the fact they’re no longer scared to be susceptible.
If you want your writing to attach like that, you have to educate your self to release your suppressed emotions and write with brutal honesty.
It’s hard to place all of your self out there, however when you grasp the approach, it’s like unshackling the chains. You will connect to your readers on a completely new stage.
The creative exercises under will train you to be fearlessly vulnerable.
1. Tell Your Best Friends Why They Suck
I’m positive you like your friends dearly, however let’s be honest, sometimes they annoy the heck out of you.
Write a letter to every of your pals, telling them what you hate approximately them. Tell them everything you want they’d stop doing and saying.
Don’t virtually ship it — I don’t want to be liable for ruining all your friendships — but don’t maintain some thing again.
And whilst you’re finished, circulate directly to own family contributors, coworkers, and so on.
2. Confront the First Person Who Broke Your Heart
Write them the letter you’ve been penning in your head since the day they reached into your chest, ripped out your coronary heart, and left it bleeding at your toes.
Tell them about the physical pain and every emotion you felt at that moment. The ones which can be seared into your mind forever.
Three. Recall Your Most Painful Experiences
Think approximately the most painful reports in your lifestyles — those that didn’t just make you shed a tear or , but made you bawl bucketloads.
Try freewriting them. Write an account of those events and permit all the emotions flood out.
You must be dripping tears onto your keyboard whilst you do this.
Four. Confess Your Deepest, Darkest Secret
Write about a secret that you’ve stored locked away out of embarrassment — something about your self that no person is aware of and which you don’t need everyone to recognize. Now’s the time to unleash the beast.
Remember, anything you write is for your eyes handiest, and when you’re executed, you can tear it up proper away.
5. Write Down the Worst Thing That Could Ever Happen
What’s that one aspect that you constantly fear will take place? What’s that one ordinary nightmare that makes you wake up screaming and sobbing?
Whatever it’s far, write approximately it. Get all of it on the web page and face your monsters.
6. Put it All Down on Paper
Grab a pen and a piece of paper. Start writing.
Don’t edit your phrases. Heck, don’t even pay attention to the phrases you’re writing. Just get them down on paper and let the creative juice glide.
In The Artist’s Way (associate hyperlink), Julia Cameron recommends growing 3 pages of “stream of recognition” writing (additionally known as “loose writing”) each unmarried morning. She calls this writing exercise “Morning Pages” and it’s a amazing manner to flex your creative muscle tissue.
7. Describe Your Most Mortifying Moment
Everyone has a second they desire they could erase. The shame and indignity of some thing you stated or did. The toe-curling embarrassment that also makes you groan in anguish each time the reminiscence pops into your head.
Put it down in writing. Remember each mortifying element. Relive the humiliation and spew it all onto the web page.
6 Writing Exercises That’ll Get Your Writing Style in Perfect Shape
When you speak, you use more than your voice. You use inflections, hand gestures and frame language to add emphasis and character. But as a author, your phrases should have energy. Each one has to count.
Your content material shouldn’t just get the message across, it must do so with aptitude and gusto. It ought to be so fascinating to examine that readers float from line to line.
That’s why each serious writer should spend serious time honing their writing fashion till it’s almost ideal.
1. Copycat Your Writing Heroes
One of the excellent methods to increase a sturdy writing style is to replicate your preferred writers by using hand — as in, pen to paper.
Pick a blogger or bestseller whose voice you recognize and copy their content material, phrase for phrase; every long emotional paragraph to each simple sentence. Don’t think too tough approximately it. Just go with it.
As you write out their words, you’ll internalize their writing style, their pace and rhythm, their grammar, their phrase choice, and their sentence shape.
Make no mistake. This is one of the most effective approaches to sharpen your writing competencies and construct creative muscle.
2. Replicate the Rhetoric from JFK and MLK
Famous speeches, like those from John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, often use rhetorical devices to strengthen their message.
See this case, wherein JFK repeats the same word at the beginning of each sentence.
What we need within the United States is not division. What we want in the United States isn’t always hatred. What we want inside the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and know-how and compassion toward one another.
Or see this situation, in which MLK uses several rhetorical gadgets in a row:
When we allow freedom ring, while we let it ring from every village and each hamlet, from every state and every city , we will be able to accelerate that day when all of God’s children, black men and white guys, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics , might be capable of be a part of arms and sing within the words of the vintage Negro non secular, “Free at last! Free at final! Thank God Almighty, we’re loose at remaining!
These are superb writing tools you may use to make your content material explode with strength.
To get a very good sense for them, google the transcripts of well-known speeches, see if you could spot wherein they use rhetorical devices just like the ones above, and then rewrite them to suit into 5 unique contexts.
For instance, you would possibly rewrite JFK’s words as such:
What we want as [GROUP] is not [BAD THING #1]. What we want as [GROUP] isn’t always [BAD THING #2]. What we want as [GROUP] isn’t always [BAD THING #3]. What we want is [GOOD THING.]”!
The intention of this writing exercise is to practice these techniques until your mind absorbs the rhythm and inflection and it will become 2nd nature to understand where to include rhetorical gadgets on your writing.
3. Eliminate 20%
Rambling sentences are a flip-off. Powerful content uses short and pacey sentences that are clean to examine and simple to grasp.
That’s why you have to teach your self to write concisely.
Select one among your old posts and rewrite it, paragraph by using paragraph. Your goal is to reduce round 20% of your general word matter with out changing the which means or deleting a point.
Focus on shortening each paragraph itself. Cut flabby words and adverbs, take away redundancy, merge sentences, and update lengthy-winded terms with shorter options. You won’t be capable of do it for each one, but try.
Do this enough, and finally conciseness turns into a natural a part of your writing system.
4. Write Your four hundred-Word Life Story
Nobody likes analyzing posts that go off on endless tangents and drag on and on about beside the point nonsense.
You want to educate your self to leave out the fluff and get to the point. You have to simplest ever percentage the minimal amount that’s wanted for the reader to get the image.
In this workout, write a story that paints a entire photo of your existence, but restrict yourself to 400 words. This forces you to awareness at the most critical events.
You can repeat this exercising with exceptional subjects as nicely. For instance, you might write a 400-word summary of the remaining movie you think or the last nonfiction book to procure on Amazon.
5. Write a Movie Dialogue
You don’t want your content material to examine like an education guide. It must study like you’re having a communication along with your readers. This makes them experience extra engaged with the content.
Writing fiction can assist with this. So, before you write your next submit, write a talk among your self and an audience member on the equal subject matter.
Think approximately how two humans could chat (like in the scene of a film), and replicate this herbal glide in your writing.
6. Find Analogies for Everyday Life
Want to be a higher writer? Analogies (and their cousins, similes and metaphors) are a creator’s great friend.
They can create effective imagery, make complicated ideas smooth to understand, and add coloration and amusing in your writing. But coming up with a super analogy is difficult — unless you consistently practice writing them.
So make a listing of everything you probably did or skilled yesterday which include getting up from bed, brushing your teeth, walking the canine, doing yoga, and so forth. Now, for every pastime, come up with a metaphor or analogy.
For example:
Every day I stand up, I sense like a zombie. Some darkish and evil pressure (the alarm) wakes me from my ‘rest in peace’. I claw myself out from underneath the covers and shuffle to the kitchen, moaning and probable drooling a little. I even have handiest one pressure at that moment: I must eat (breakfast, no longer brains), and I received’t prevent till my hunger is sated.
Brushing with an electric toothbrush is like taking your enamel to the carwash. You push the brush onto every side of your enamel until they’re easy and then you rinse.
Training your brain to make connections between unrelated matters gets your creative juices flowing and make you extra innovative. Practice it sufficient and you’ll discover that metaphors and similes will come to you evidently as you address your next post or writing assignment.
Hint: Finding high-quality analogies is crazy-hard. Use this guide to make sure you’re doing it right.
2 Writing Exercises That’ll Give Your Writing a Hilarious Left Hook
Your content material shouldn’t just teach and inspire your audience, it need to also entertain. And sprinkling within the bizarre comic story here and there can go an extended manner.
Humor allows you hook up with your target market. It makes your content material stand out in what may be an otherwise humorless niche, and this means it’s more likely to be remembered.
Don’t worry — you don’t should turn out to be the next Jerry Seinfeld. But with these sporting activities, you may educate your self to locate the humorous within the mundane.
1. Look at the World Through Distorted Glasses
One reliable manner to make people chortle is to place the whole thing in the international into new and absurd contexts.
You fake you don’t recognise what an object or custom is without a doubt for, and then guess at what its authentic purpose is.
For example, you might take a look at an iPad and determine it’s a:
Frisbee for rectangular people
Skating rink for mice
Chopping board for the insanely wealthy
See how that works?
Don’t fear about sounding silly. The trick is to think absolutely outdoor the field.
2. Pile on the Exaggeration
Another true manner to move for laughs is to magnify some thing to the point of absurdity.
If you need an example of this in movement, see this video of Phyllis Diller speaking about her mother-in-regulation:
Get the image?
Good. Now brainstorm twenty endings to every of these sentences:
My house is so small…
My cat is so lazy…
My wife is so bossy…
My domestic city is so hick…
My process is so uninteresting…
Don’t fear if they’re not all comedy gold. The concept is to exercise. The extra you do it, the simpler it will become.
And whilst you’re done with this list, hold training. Use belongings you own or people you know, define a few of their characteristics (e.G., my vehicle is crimson, tiny, old, guzzles gas, has powerful brakes, etc.), after which make a listing of exaggerations.
Four Writing Exercises That’ll Beef Up Your Scene-Painting Skills
Dry content is boring. If you want to evoke a powerful response, you need to evoke your reader’s senses.
You have to paint tangible scenes, the usage of visual and sensual language to make your phrases burst off the web page in wonderful technicolor.
Take this extract from one among Jon Morrow’s most inspiring posts, An Open Letter to Writers Struggling to Find Their Courage. It’s chock-full of phrases that paint a photograph photo of a fish:
Have you ever watched a fish suffocate?
You move fishing in the future along with your rod and reel, hook a fish, and reel it in, dragging it out of the water so you can get a higher look at your capture. It’s lying on land, its gills pumping furiously, its eyes bulging, its mouth starting and final in silent screams. Every once in a while, it flips round, looking to paintings its way returned into the water, but it’s no need; the terrible aspect is hooked.
Minutes skip, and you may see the energy slipping out of it. It fights much less and less, its eyes stupid, and ultimately, it is going nevertheless.
Jon Morrow
When you study that, can’t you just see the fish flip-flopping in front of you?
Powerful, isn’t it?
Use these physical games to practice painting bright scenes yourself.
1. Describe the Best (and Worst) Date You Ever Had
What had been you sporting? Where did you meet up? What had been the primary phrases from your mouth?
Describe your recollections of the date, making them as bright and tangible as viable.
Don’t inform us she became pretty. Tell us how her glowing eyes made you tingle from head to toe. Make us image the scene, hear the sounds, and experience your sensations.
2. Write About Meeting Your In-Laws for the First Time
Was it terrifying? Funny? Heartwarming?
Did your mother-in-law’s eyes laser your heart earlier than her tongue lashed at your soul? Or turned into she as welcoming as fried chicken at a own family barbeque?
3. Recall Your Most Vivid Memory of School
This one speaks for itself. So I’ll just come up with an instance of my personal:
At number one faculty, I hated rice pudding with a passion. One day I refused to consume it, so my trainer refused to allow me go away the table. It turned into a warfare of wills. I sat, arms crossed, gazing the bloodless, congealed, white mush, with cheap jelly splodged throughout its yucky skin. Beside me, my teacher cajoled, pleaded, threatened, and silently cursed. I won.
What’s your maximum vibrant memory of college? Describe each detail.
4. Write About Your Greatest Sporting Moment
Write an account of your most wonderful wearing achievement, whether you’re an Olympic champion, or you and your brother won the under-fives’ three-legged race at your network fair.
Relive each effective moment as you realized you had been about to make your own non-public model of wearing records.
Three Writing Exercises That’ll Make You Pack a More Persuasive Punch
Your writing have to be persuasive if you need it to paste in people’s minds.
It should convince your readers to look your point of view. It ought to persuade your readers to trust in themselves. Sometimes, it ought to persuade readers to buy what you’re promoting.
So here are a few physical games to exercise your persuasion talents.
1. Give Your Younger Self a Pep-Talk
Everyone is a work in progress, which is why one of the high-quality methods to influence human beings is to expose them a higher version of themselves. If you could inspire a person, you could convince them.
But no longer anybody is naturally inspirational. That’s why you have to practice.
You ought to have had moments on your beyond while you could’ve used some words of encouragement — moments while you felt scared, or involved, or defeated.
Find those moments for your lifestyles, and write your younger self a pep-talk. Write down what you needed to listen in that moment. Inspire your younger self to keep their head up and keep going. Show them that higher version of themselves.
2. Write a Super-Slick Sales Page for a Dinner Plate
You won’t have any services or products on provide but, but sooner or later, you probably will. That manner you received’t simply need to realize the way to promote, but you’ll ought to get over whatever hangups you have approximately being “salesy.”
Pick an object from your house — some thing mundane, like a dinner plate, a pencil, or a towel — and write an over-the-top income pitch for it.
Think about the blessings of the object, and what capabilities it has that makes it stand out in opposition to other comparable items. By picking an earthly item, you pressure your self to get creative whilst you consider its particular promoting factors.
3. Write an Assertive Op-Ed Piece for the New York Times
When you write a blog submit, you must write with authority. That way you can’t be wishy-washy along with your language and you can’t hold returned your opinions due to the fact you’re afraid they could rub human beings the incorrect way. (Remember, you have to be fearless.)
Train yourself to be assertive to your writing by using choosing a arguable topic you feel strongly about and pretending the New York Times requested you to write an op-ed on it.
State your opinion truly and proudly, keep away from ambiguity, and explain in no uncertain phrases why you experience the way you feel.
5 Writing Exercises That’ll Strengthen Your Creative Muscles
Everyone loves an amazing story. And knowledge the mechanics of telling an excellent tale will make you a far more attractive author.
Did you understand, for instance, that maximum extraordinary tales observe a 3-act structure?
It usually breaks down like this:
Act 1: The Set-Up. This act introduces us to the hero and the sector they stay in. It sets up the status quo and units up the story’s foremost war by using giving the hero a problem to solve or an antagonist to beat.
Act 2: The Confrontation. The hero confronts the trouble. This act also generally includes the hero amassing the abilities, gear, and/or alliances they need to confront the problem.
Act three: The Resolution. The hero solves the problem. Their world has modified for the better.
When you do the sporting events under, attempt to mix matters up with the aid of writing shorter and longer stories. Write a multi-web page short tale, then write a three-paragraph tale. But practice the 3-act shape on every occasion, till you have it down pat.
1. Write Your Own Superhero Story
Imagine you’re a superhero who has to save the arena from a terrible evil. Use your real existence for notion, however sprinkle in fantastical elements to make things more exciting.
Where do you come from? What’s your superpower? Who or what gave you your powers? What’s your kryptonite? Who’s your evil arch-enemy?
Have fun with this one!
2. Write a Series of Café Stories
Sit in a café and examine the people around you. Pick a person who appears interesting. Now, use each ounce of your imagination and write his or her tale.
What delivered them to this coffee keep? Are they inside the first act of their story and approximately to set off on an journey, or are they within the 1/3 act and getting better from the adventure they’d?
3. Write Crime Thrillers About Your Neighbors
Did you ever see the film Rear Window? Or have you ever read this year’s literary thriller, The Woman in The Window? Both observe a comparable compelling storyline of someone witnessing a criminal offense in a neighboring house… or did they?
Next time you’re on foot your dog round your neighborhood, pay extra interest to the homes you pass or have a look at them in a specific manner. Now write a synopsis of a short mystery stimulated with the aid of any of the houses you notice (or can see into). Let the the front yard, architecture, and likely the human beings drive your twisted tale.
Four. Write a Graveyard Tale
Go in your neighborhood graveyard and wander around the tombstones. Take thought from the inscriptions and write a series of short stories approximately the characters you locate.
How did they die? Who did they depart in the back of? Are they connected to everybody else inside the graveyard?
Five. Write a Fairy Tale about the Big Bad Wolf
Think of your favorite fairy stories (Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel) and rewrite them from the bad guy’s factor of view.
Put your self in their footwear. Think approximately what stimulated them, what they had been trying to achieve, and whether or not they cared what other humans idea of them.
Do the same for each of the primary characters inside the tale (e.G., the mother, the grandma, the woodcutter). And subsequently, create a new disinterested observer and write the same fairy tale from their point of view.
This will educate you to assume greater deeply about individual development for your tales.
Which of These Creative Writing Exercises is Your Favorite?
You made it!
You’ve finished a complete run-via of your writing exercising.
All you have to do now is start working towards these sports for actual.
Every day. Every week and every month.
Find or three sports or creative writing prompts that attraction to you and start a regimen for 15-20 minutes an afternoon. After a couple of weeks, pick every other two or three and start again.
Keep clean them. Keep enthused and hold at it.
Before you understand it, you’re going to go from that puny man at the punching bag to heavyweight writing champion of the sector.