3 Exercises to Dramatically Boost Your Writing
You want to improve as a writer—but you don’t want to spend all your time doing craft exercises when you can barely find time to work on your actual book. Does this sound like you?
If so, you’re in the right place. In this post, I’m sharing three exercises that will dramatically boost your writing skills and move you further along in your current creative writing project. Let’s go.
As a kid I loved writing assignments in class. Things like, someone leaves a mystery box on your doorstep…you open it and! Fill in the blank.
But once I was working on an actual book as an adult, I became less of a fan of random prompts and exercises. If I was going to spend time writing, I wanted it to be on writing I could use in my book.
A prompt like, write a passage only using words that start with P was cute but…I wasn’t going to drop “Peter picked pears patiently” into my actual draft.
The exercises I am going to teach you today are to help you generate writing that you’ll actually use in your work. I’ve used all 3 of them and they’ve made a huge difference in my writing.
So here they are.
Exercise #1: Brainstorm a secret
We all have secrets. Tell me that hearing a secret doesn’t immediately make someone more interesting, and I won’t believe you.
When I was working on my first novel, When You Read This, I had this character. His name was Smith. Very vanilla name for a very vanilla man.
He was supposed to be vanilla…passive, uninteresting. But because I was writing a character who was passive and uninteresting on purpose, he was also falling flat.
Over and over, I got the feedback that Smith just wasn’t rich enough…the readers who I was sharing my book draft with couldn’t connect with him.
So I thought about it and thought about it, and I realized something: passive people aren’t actually passive. They just appear passive. They’re actually usually very active internally, because they turn conflict inward, where other people turn it outward.
How could Smith have a private manifestation of his anxiety? I gave him a secret gambling addiction, and, like that, he came to life.
What are some kinds of secrets a character could have?
An action they're ashamed of
An action they may not be ashamed of, but that they know will upset or hurt someone else to know about
A feeling they believe they shouldn't be feeling or don't want to feel
An opinion that's dangerous or unpopular
A secret they're holding for someone else
A good lie they're keeping to bring someone else happiness
A fear (ex: fraud syndrome) that things aren't what they seem, or that they don't deserve what they have
A belief that they don't want to be true (and saying it aloud would make it true)
Exercise #2: Copy a master’s prose
Speaking of secrets, here’s one of mine. Back when I was in my 20s, half a century ago, I was worried I wasn’t smart enough to be a writer.
I’d taken one creative writing class in college—one!—and the teacher had given me B minuses.
This is one reason that, once I graduated, I applied to law school. But that’s another story for another day.
I had read somewhere that Shakespeare’s vocabulary was 25,000 words.
I ordered a pocket dictionary—now, this was not only before smart phones but before Amazon. I told you, I’m ancient—so this pocket dictionary I had to find myself and it did not arrive via Prime in 48 hours.
It was electronic, the size of a paperback book, and I carried it around with me so I could look up words I didn’t know as I heard them.
I know, it was very cute if it weren’t a little bit sad. Because what I did not realize, until this exercise that I’m about to explain to you, is that my vocabulary was perfectly fine.
For this exercise, you’re going to pick a writer you love. Not a writer everyone else loves. Not Shakespeare if you don’t love Shakespeare. A writer you love, whether that’s Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games, or JK Rowling.
Choose a paragraph that you think is great. You just like it. Not because you think it’s smart, but because when you read it like a reader, you feel something, or can visualize something…it’s powerful in that way.
Now, copy it by hand, word for word.
What do you notice?
I’ll tell you what I noticed—that my favorite authors very rarely used words I didn’t know. Mostly, they used the same words I knew and used…they were just really good at stringing those words together.
This was a huge relief to me. It felt like a door opening. Because it meant I didn’t have loads of homework and vocab memorization to do before I wrote a great story. I could write one with the vocabulary I already had.
Sure, occasionally they used a word I didn’t know…but that’s never changed, even as I’ve grown older and read more. We just learn new words all the time, and that’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean anything about our capacity to write.
If you want to take this exercise even further, try this advanced version of it.
After you copy down a sentence or paragraph you like, remove all of the substantive words, so that all you’re left with are words that keep the sentence sort of hanging together.
If the sentence were: She tried to blow up the balloon and fainted, you could change it to _____ tried to ________ and ________. Then fill in the template with your own words, so that it makes sense in your own story.
You obviously wouldn’t want to write a whole story or book this way, that’s not the point of this exercise. The point here is to try on new ways of structuring your sentences by actually sampling how your favorite writers write. It can be really fun, too!
When I did this exercise, I realized that I wrote in relatively short and simple sentences, while authors I love were more willing to play around with longer, meandering sentences. So this exercise gave me permission to try that.
Copying can stretch you in a way that opens up a new stylistic pathway for you.
Exercise #3: Copy a master’s structure
At some point when I was working on my first novel, I decided that I wanted to write it in all emails. Like, I wanted to tell the entire story through only emails.
But how do you tell a story in all emails?
I knew of one chapter in Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad that’s written in PowerPoint slides—it’s a great novel if you haven’t checked it out—but that was just one chapter.
How did you do that with a whole story? Like an entire book?
Then I found Where’d You Go Bernadette, by Maria Semple. A book told through email!
I sat down and actually made a chart: okay, what kind of email is on page 1? How about page 2? I’m talking story-wise—what’s each email doing to advance the story?
I didn’t make this chart for the entire book, only the first 30 pages or so. But doing this gave me a sense of pacing—how fast the story should be unfolding.
So give that a whirl—actually make a kind of reverse-outline of someone else’s story that you love. What do you notice about pacing that you can learn from?
It’s a fascinating exercise, and one I recommend to writers I work with all the time when they’re having trouble with story structure.
Ready to write your book?
Speaking of writers I work with—are you writing a book, or want to write a book? Because if so, I want to talk to you.
When I’m not writing, my mission in life is to help talented writers write their dream books. I love it. I live for it.
Before I published my novels, I first had to figure out how to write one. It wasn't easy because none of the writing classes I was taking showed me how to actually write a novel.
Not until I had a newborn and only a couple of hours to write did I come up with a process. The process worked. I wrote my entire novel during my 8-week maternity leave. Now, I teach it in my program the Book Incubator and it works for dozens of other writers.
If you're curious to know more, I have a free video walking you through my exact process for writing a book. You can get it by clicking below and answering two questions to apply to the program. You get the video whether you join or not—no pressure to enroll.
Just click below to tell me a little bit about you and your book—you can fill out a form online. I’m so excited to hear from you!
