Sit
for ten minutes or longer in a setting (under a tree, in the food
court of a mall, in the breakfast room of your house) and observe.
List everything your senses detect: the temperature and humidity
of the air, the distant or minute noises you might otherwise
ignore, the ants on the sidewalk beneath your feet, a snatch of
conversation from a table across the room. Then write a
description of that setting in complete sentences.
An exercise in observation and description. Writers must have a keen set of senses if they are to make their readers see and feel, and often beginning writers don't seem to pay attention to the world around them.
Write
a sentence of one hundred words or more. Then write a sentence
immediately following of ten words or less.
An exercise in expanding your personal writing style. Most beginning students write the same sentence pattern over and over again: subject/verb/object. Experiment with dashes, colons, semicolons, and don't forget that brevity is sometimes the soul of wit. For examples of stylistic diversity look at the works of William Faulkner, T.R. Pearson, or Charles Dickens.
Copy
out five consecutive sentences from the work of one of your
favorite writers. Then, below it, write five sentences of your
own--using any subject matter that comes to your head--that employ
the exact same sentence patterns and punctuation.
An exercise in close study and writing style. Other artists often begin with rote imitation: a student painter copies a painting by Rembrandt and tries to reproduce his colors, shapes, brush strokes. It's a type of learning that writers typically ignore--perhaps for fear of plagiarizing--but I believe close study and imitation of style should be a part of a writer's early development.
Describe
a setting (a lake, a barn, a warehouse, a frozen food aisle in a
grocery store) from the standpoint of a person who has experienced
a great loss. Then describe the same scene from the emotional
standpoint of a person feeling great joy. Do not name the
emotion in either sketch; it should be apparent from the mood you
create and the details you describe.
An exercise in description and writing emotion. Note how the emotion comes from the choice of details and the word picture you paint. Adapted from the teachings of John Gardner and Robert Olen Butler.
Write a story
using a newspaper headline as your inspiration.
An exercise in plotting. Remember that newspaper headlines tell the climax (or even the resolution) of a story: "Great-Grandmother Graduates Summa Cum Laude" or "Jenkins Given Life for Slayings." Your task is to try and create the details that led up to this resolution. Adapted from Jon Franklin.
In five
minutes, write a story about betrayal. About loss. About revenge.
About a party. About rain.
An exercise in plotting that cuts to the conflict inherent in a story. You can do this, of course, with any emotion, or with any situation. Adapted from Roberta Allen's Fast Fiction, which contains lots of useful exercises of this type.
Choose
an event in your life with which you associate strong emotion.
Then--beginning just before you experienced that emotion--write
the scene in moment by moment detail so that the reader can follow
through the experience exactly as you felt it. Do not
summarize or analyze what is happening around you,
and do not name the emotion anywhere in the
sketch
An exercise in remembering and writing emotion. Robert Olen Butler, from whose teaching this exercise comes, believes we call up the emotion we put into a scene just as a method actor calls up emotions from the past to portray them in the present. Expect to feel those old joys or hurts as you write about them; it's one of the ways that you can be sure you're writing honestly. By avoiding summary, analysis, and naming the emotion, we avoid predigesting the scene for the reader and allow him or her to contact it just as we did.
Write a
scene of dialogue in which one of the characters has a secret he
has to tell the other.
An exercise in writing dialogue with an undercurrent of conflict. Good dialogue is always more than just surface talk. In class, we often use the situation of a man who wants to tell his wife or girlfriend's best friend that he is in love with her but does not know how she will respond to this news (I have to confess that I stole this plot from an old "Family Ties" episode where Michael J. Fox had to break the news to the girl in a train station); you of course could pick another "plot" for your scene.
Answer
on paper the following questions about a story you are working on:
Who is having the problem? What is the problem? Where and when
does it take place? What excites you about the problem? How is the
problem resolved?
An exercise in plotting. Conflict is vital for an effective story, and understanding the conflict is a central part of telling the story successfully. Adapted from Roberta Allen's Fast Fiction. Another way to think of conflict comes from Robert Olen Butler, who encourages writers to ask what the main character "yearns" for; what he or she wants or needs.
Write a
story inspired by a personal ad.
An exercise in character and plotting. In a good (or at least interesting) personal ad you will get a sense of the writer's physical, emotional, or spiritual characteristics (at least as portrayed by the writer). Now, what sort of person might respond to this ad? What sorts of results might such a meeting have? What if no one responds to the ad?
Write a
scene in which two people who once loved each other but parted
under unhappy circumstances meet at a reunion, gas station, video
store. Then write the same scene (with the same outcome) using a
different point of view. If you used first person the first time,
try a third-person viewpoint or vice-versa.
An exercise in dialogue, scene-building, and point of view. This situation has built-in tension, so the dialogue will simmer if you don't allow the characters to say too much too quickly, and there are lots of different paths the contact may take. Writing the scene from more than one point of view will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of various points of view and may show you how to choose the most appropriate way to tell a story.
Write a
dramatic character sketch of someone you observe who seems to live
a very different life from your own. Try to get into the
character's daily routine, thoughts, emotions, and
beliefs.
An exercise in observation and character. I call this an "empathy exercise" when I assign it to my students, for their task is to get in the shoes of someone who seems radically different from them and walk around for awhile. If you're a young African-American male, choose an elderly Jewish female; if you're upper middle class, imagine the life of a street person or a minimum wage worker at the grocery store. Or it may be that a person has caught your fancy and you'd like to imagine that person's life.
Take two
characters who can't stand each other and put them in a situation
where they have no choice but to interact with each other (for
example, get them stuck in an elevator together). Write their
encounter in moment-by-moment detail.
Stolen explicitly from Annie Lamott, although this is the sort of tension-builder we find in lots of good stories. This is great as a dialogue exercise because the scene has a subtext of emotion from the outset, and what they don't say is as interesting as what they do.
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