Wednesday Writing Exercise: Literary Roadshow

Writer’s Digest’s prolific blogroll introduced a new feature a couple of months ago: Promptly, a blog updated three times a week with writing exercises to get the juices flowing. I started digging around in the relatively recent archives and discovered a prompt centered around words that have already been written—and published: “Pull a random, seemingly [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: StoWriDay

NaNoWriMo—i.e., National Novel Writing Month—is right around the corner. Here’s an exercise from Creative Writing Corner to get you warmed up: write a story in a day.
There are two tacks you can take with this general idea:

Choose a day, a significant day, in the life of a character, and write a story that takes place [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Eulogy

The hardest part about laying a loved one to rest for me has never been the funeral nor the burial. No, what brings me to tears is the viewing, usually held the day before the funeral, where friends and family gather to pay condolences and say goodbye. In our culture, there’s a moment during the [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Hatch’s Plot Bank

Looking for the plotline for your next novel, short story, or screenplay? Need a prompt for tonight’s writing group? Find literally thousands of story starters at Hatch’s Plot Bank, ranging from “sitcom clichés” to bizarre scenarios ripped from the headlines.
Scrolling through all of these snatches of language can quickly become overwhelming, though, so use a [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Donald Maass’s Plotting Exercise

Breathe new life into your WIP with this plotting exercise from Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.
First, tear a sheet of paper into fifteen pieces. On the first five pieces, write down the names of characters from your project, both major and secondary. On the next five, list five actions or events that take [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Clue

Here’s another prompt borrowed from Red Plume Press, who in turn got the idea from Soup Kitchen Writing:
Write down a name.
Name an action.
Pick an object.
Choose another name.
Now assemble these into a sentence.
The inspiration for this exercise is the game of Clue, in which players mix and match six characters, six objects, and nine locations to [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Mix-and-Match Analogies

Write down four adjectives.
Then list four nouns.
Finally, think up four gerund phrases.
Now mix and match words and phrases from each of these lists to create analogies.
I stepped out onto my balcony and looked around for inspiration. What I came up with ranged from quite realistic to rather whimsical:

like a breezy Smart Car speeding down a [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Thirteen Writing Prompts from McSweeney’s

Google “writing prompts,” and a wealth of story starters appears. It’s this glut of sometimes ridiculous material that Dan Wiencek satirizes for McSweeney’s with “Thirteen Writing Prompts.” Among my favorites is this John Gardner-inspired exercise:
Write a scene showing a man and a woman arguing over the man’s friendship with a former girlfriend. Do not mention [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: First Sentences

I spend a fair amount of time each day trolling the web for articles about writing that are helpful or insightful or inspirational. (To see the fruits of my labors, log on to my Twitter timeline.) Of all the posts I’ve read (and, admittedly, scanned) one from five or six weeks ago has stuck with [...]

Wednesday Writing Exercise: Random Name Generators

I have a terrible time naming characters. I once wrote a stream-of-consciousness essay on why I named the main character in my WIP Rebekka rather than, say, Erika. (She later became Helen and is back to Rebekka again, but that’s more a matter of plot revisions—for another post.)
Lately I’ve been suffering from writers block and [...]