Writing Exercises

Write a shopping list for your character. What kind of things would they shop for on a weekly basis?

Your character made it to the front page of the local newspaper!

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlour game popularized by Marcel Proust, the French essayist and novelist, who believed that, in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature.

Choose a famous fairytale or story. Choose one scene from this story and retell it in your own words. But this time you pick a different character to be the main character and you write the scene from their perspective.

We have been taught in school to write in proper grammatically correct sentences. When you start writing dialogue this is the first thing you must unlearn. If you listen carefully most people don’t speak in complete and perfect sentences.

You character receives a phone call. The first thing the person on the other end of the line says is the classic sentence: “Are you sitting down?”

Grab a map or an atlas. Close your eyes and flip through the pages of the atlas, move your finger over the map and let it land somewhere. Where are you?

Pick a book from your shelf. Go to page eight and then to line eight. Copy the sentence that starts on that line to the top of your page and use that as the first line of your story.

For movies show, don’t tell is common Knowledge, but the same goes for writing. You can just tell your reader that Alexander is feeling lonely and scared, but that won’t create the feeling of lonely and scared in the reader and won’t help us engage in the story