Creative Writing Exercises Part 1

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Introduction

As opposed to what many people think creativity is not something you are born with. It is true that if you have been exposed to scenarios where your creative side was stimulated, you will probably turn out to be more creative. However, that does not mean that creativity is not something that can be improved (or developed) with some proper “training.”

As with everything in life, the more you exercise it, the better you become. When it comes to writing, there are endless resources you could use and hundreds of creative writing exercises at your disposal. The more you practice writing, the better you become, so here is the first part of creative writing exercises that will help with your creativity when writing!

1- Alphabet Writing Exercise

Begin writing a story and start every sentence with a different letter of the alphabet. The idea is to use the letters A to Z in the first word of every sentence.

This exercise works because it challenges people to think outside the box, especially in words that we do not normally use. Keep an eye open for synonyms and words that are close in meaning when doing this exercise.

2- Write From Someone Else’s Perspective

Choose a person or a character you are familiar with and write from their perspective. You can re-write something you wrote before, you can create a new story, or just describe events and objects from this person’s perspective. The idea is not to write what you think, but what the other person would think.

This exercise is good because it helps you to understand characters better. What do they think? How do they react to the world around them? What motivates them? What upsets them? The questions are endless. Just make sure you formulated a character with its own opinions and tastes, and not write about what YOU would think.

3- Pick a Word You Don’t Know

Open a dictionary (or search for an online one) and pick a word you have never heard before or do not know the meaning of. Use that word in a context and see if you can write a story using that as a starting point.

Another idea I saw somewhere was to download a dictionary app and use the “word of the day” feature. The idea is the same: to write about a word in the dictionary. In this case, it can be a word you know or not, but try to read about all the meanings of that word. Maybe it is a common word, but you can take out of the usual context and place it on another one in the meaning.

There are no wrong or right answers. This exercise will help with your creativity and you will probably be surprised by the number of ideas you can get from a single word.

4- The Ben Franklin Method

This is a famous one! To set the scenario, Ben Franklin used to read his favorite magazine, The Spectator, and summarize the main points of some of the articles. Days later, he would go back to his notes and attempt to write the story based solely on his notes. The idea was not to recreate the story piece by piece but to use his own words to retell the story.

This exercise helps writers to describe and explain using their own words but keeping the essence of the story. A variation of that is to open the newspaper of your choice (online or not), pick a random story, and practice free writing using that as the basis.

5- Write With Images

Find pictures that inspire or interest you and attempt to write a story based on that. If you like art, you can try to write a story based on a famous painting or sculpture. If you want to make things more interesting, pick multiple images and try to write a story using all of them. The more different they are, the more difficult will be to piece all of them in the same story, but the challenge is worth it!

This prompt will help you exercise description in writing and to look at images from a different perspective. Try to stay away from cliches. Better yet, pick an image that should be a cliche but turn into an amazing story!