50 Excellent Writing Exercises to Cultivate Your Creativity & Craft. If you’re a good writer, you can succeed in any industry, no matter what kind of online degree you have. But even great writers sometimes have trouble organizing their work, polishing up the details, or even picking a cohesive idea to write about. Here are 50 excellent writing exercises to help cultivate your creativity and craft, from brainstorming to beating writer’s block and remembering your motivation.
Brainstorming and Organization Try these brainstorming exercises to map out your ideas, spur on your creativity, and plan your project. Levels: Break down your topic sentence or main theme into levels to create subtopics and then single terms that you can explore individually with lists, charts or free-writing.Free-writing: This traditional form of brainstorming involves writing down anything that comes to your mind even if you don’t think it makes sense.
Writer’s Block Use prompts: Print out and then cut up these prompts to store in a writer’s block box. Games Language and Grammar Style. Timothy Hallinan - Writer's Resources. Finishing Your Novel “A writer is someone who finishes.” -- Thomas Farber This section is for you if: You’ve started a novel but are having trouble finishing it, or You want to start a novel but aren’t sure you’ll be able to finish it. I’ve been writing novels (and teaching about writing novels) for twenty years, and one thing I’ve learned is how to finish. I’d estimate that 98% of all the novels people begin are never completed. Every person who abandons a book feels that he or she has a good reason, but my experience suggests that most of those books could have been finished – the writer just came up against something he or she couldn’t handle.
This section is about how to handle those things. Finishing a novel (or any kind of writing project) is a transformational experience. A long time ago, something funny happened to me. I thought I was a writer. And then my house burned down. This area of the site is based on what I've learned since then. Daily Zen List — 12 Useful Websites to Improve Your Writing. By Johnny Webber 1. Words-to-Use.com – A different kind of thesaurus. 2. OneLook.com – One quick dictionary search tool. 3. 4. 5. 750words.com – Write three new pages every day. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Character and Characterisation in the Novel. How to write convincing characters Characterisation - the task of building characters - isn't easy.
But if you're struggling to build characters with real life and vigour, here is our very own patented technique. If you haven't yet started your book, then work on the exercise below before you start. If you have started, but think that maybe you started prematurely, then back up, do the exercise and then look back over your existing work. Oh, and don't feel patronised at being given exercises. Learning to know your characters Strong characterisation is based on knowledge. The Ultimate Character Builder Begin with a blank sheet (or screen). You should aim to cover at least five pages with this exercise. The less central a character is to your book, the less you need to know him/her. And the exercise will work.
Checking your work Once you've got a fair way into your writing (say 5 to 10,000 words), then look back at it. Even genre fiction needs swiftly drawn, believable characters. 50 Most Challenging Words | Just English. Back in 2010 The New York Times published a list of 50 fancy words that most frequently stump their readership. The New York Times 50 Fancy Words (defined and used) 1.
Inchoate: just begun and so not fully formed or developed I am glad your inchoate proposals for integrating the company were not accepted this time, thus saving us face. 2. Anderson’s profligacy cost him his job and its better you tighten up your belt before you go the same way. 3. Mr. 4. Every major war on this planet were followed by many years of austerity. 5.
The firm’s profligate spending only hastened its downfall. 6. Humpty Dumpty’s antics remain a constant source of baldenfreude for children and adults alike. 7. His ludicrous attempts at mimicry in the office only earned him the opprobrium of his colleagues. 8. The millionaire technocrat and his cronies were publicly derided for being apostates, after they were exposed of polluting the environment while purporting to have spent large sums for water conservation. 9. 10. 11. New York Times 50 Most Challenging Words (defined and used) | Currently Obsessed. The New York Times recently published a list of 50 fancy words that most frequently stump their readership. They are able to measure this data thanks to a nifty in-page lookup mechanism, which you can try here. Try double-clicking the word “epicenter”.
Since the NYT didn’t include definitions of these words, I decided to post a job to MediaPiston to produce an article defining and using each word in the list. Voila! The New York Times 50 Fancy Words (defined and used) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. Handy Latin Phrases. How to Finish What You Start: A Five-Step Plan for Writers. How to finish what you start Do you have a bunch of first chapters tucked away in a drawer – for seven different novels? Is there a folder full of abandoned short stories on your computer? Have you left a trail of abandoned blogs around the internet?
Did your ebook fizzle out after a few pages? Most writers have been there … again, and again, and again. When I began writing, I spent plenty of time starting stories. The problem was, I pretty much never finished them. Maybe it’s the same for you. No-one’s going to buy a half-written novel. Here’s how: Step #1: Stop Starting New Projects Believe me, I know how tempting it is to grab that new idea and run with it. Do it: Decide, right now, that you won’t start anything new until you’ve finished something off. Step #2: Assess Your Current Projects Take a long, hard look at all your current works-in-progress. Is there anything that’s just not worth completing? Rather than keeping old projects hanging around, ditch any that have died on you:
Periodic Table of Storytelling. Max Barry | Fifteen Ways to Write a Novel. Every year I get asked what I think about NaNoWriMo, and I don’t know how to answer, because I don’t want to say, “I think it makes you write a bad novel.” This is kind of the point. You’re supposed to churn out 50,000 words in one month, and by the end you have a goddamn novel, one you wouldn’t have otherwise. If it’s not Shakespeare, it’s still a goddamn novel.
The NaNoWriMo FAQ says: “Aiming low is the best way to succeed,” where “succeed” means “write a goddamn novel.” I find it hard to write a goddamn novel. Some of these methods I use a lot, some only when I’m stuck. The Word TargetWhat: You don’t let yourself leave the keyboard each day until you’ve hit 2,000 words. 25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer. When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult.
Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.” Today, writing well is more important than ever. Far from being the province of a select few as it was in Hemingway’s day, writing is a daily occupation for all of us — in email, on blogs, and through social media. So what can we do to improve our writing short of hanging ourselves? 1. Don’t just plan to write—write. 2. [The] Resistance knows that the longer we noodle around “getting ready,” the more time and opportunity we’ll have to sabotage ourselves. 3. Find your best time of the day for writing and write. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. Treat writing as a job. 10. 11. 12. Book Ideas for Young Writers. Write Like a Girl (or Guy) If all the characters you create talk exactly like you do, no one but your mom is going to want to read your book—and maybe not even her if you haven't called recently.
That's why you need to understand how to write dialogue that sounds authentic, even when your character differs from you when it comes to their age, region, education level, social status, background, personality, and/or gender. Each of these factors plays a role in how a person (real or fictional) speaks, and you need to consider all of them to make your characters’ dialogue sound truly legit. But today we’re focusing on gender. Let’s preface this whole shebang with a disclaimer: Like anything involving differences between sexes, this can be a bit of a touchy subject. The first studies in 1922—not exactly the golden age of feminism—used what linguists call the “deficit” approach, so named because women’s language use was considered deficient compared to men’s.
Things have improved significantly. Handling problems. Words to Try to Use in Colloquial Speech Without Sounding Like a Pretentious Ass - Wordnik List. Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing - Stepcase Lifehack. Tone/Attitude Words. Tools for creating ideas. Ambiguous Words. I Write Like.