Transform Your Writing Skills with These Five Powerful Writing Exercises

Ready to elevate your writing game and captivate your readers from the first sentence? Dive into these five powerful writing exercises that will sharpen your storytelling skills and bring your narratives to life.

Exercise 1 - Dialogue vs. Exposition

Start by writing a scene of dialogue between 2 or 3 characters. Then, rewrite the same scene without any dialogue, focusing solely on narrative description to convey the same heart of the scene. This will hone your ability to show rather than tell, combating the use of exposition, which is every writer's arch-nemesis. Exposition, essentially anything that explains information directly to the reader, can feel forced and disrupt the believability of your characters. You want the reader to feel as if the characters are experiencing the narrative, not that they are a tool solely created for the purpose of pushing the narrative along. With this exercise, you will soon convey emotions, intentions, and conflicts through actions and descriptions, creating a more immersive experience for your readers.

Exercise 2 - Character Depth Through Action

For this exercise, take a story you've written and strip the main character of all physical descriptions. Have someone read it and see if they can accurately describe who the character is and what they look like, based solely on their actions and reactions within the narrative. This exercise challenges you to develop multi-dimensional characters through their actions versus relying on traditional physical descriptions. It encourages you to delve into their motivations, beliefs, and behaviors, creating characters that feel authentic and relatable to your readers. And there is no better feeling than the elation of someone knowing your protagonist was a "16-year-old blind Nova Scotia tour guide" from the quality of the character development alone.

Exercise 3 - The Protagonist's Obstacle Course

In this simple exercise, you will craft four sentences that outline a character's simple objective and the obstacles they face in achieving it.

1. For the first sentence, describe a character with a simple objective. For example, "Susan wants to leave the room." 

2. Then, write a sentence that creates an obstacle to your character's goals: "Susan finds that her legs are so heavy and tired that she can barely move them." 

3. Your next sentence will show your protagonist trying to get around the first obstacle with limited success while creating or discovering new ones.  "Susan frantically massages her legs, giving them new life, but as she takes her first tentative step, she hears a loud pop in her knee and goes down."

4. Finally, the last sentence is an opportunity to create a “ticking clock” situation to add urgency to your character's predicament. As Susan crawls towards the door, she realizes she has knocked the candle off the coffee table, and there is now a small fire shyly flickering at her heels.

At its core, all narrative revolves around a character's objective and their journey through obstacles to achieve it. This dynamic keeps readers engaged and eager to uncover what happens next. This exercise helps you get into the habit of thinking about how to heighten tension in your writing. You don't always need high-octane action like in a TV show or thriller novel; even subtle conflicts can make your writing more compelling. Also, it's a fantastic way to break through writer's block. Doing this exercise a few times when you feel stuck in your story can reignite your creativity. Begin with the character's goal, add an obstacle, show their attempt to overcome it, which now becomes the character's new goal that there can be obstacles to, and raise the stakes with a time-sensitive element. This exercise teaches you to structure your narratives around characters' goals and the challenges they face, improving your ability to craft engaging conflicts and keep readers hooked.

Exercise 4 - Setting Exploration

Imagine a setting anywhere in the world and spend no more than 10 minutes writing a short scene featuring a few characters having a conversation in that locale. Let your imagination run free. Don't edit yourself; just jot down whatever comes to you at that moment. This exercise is a great writing warmup, but you'll also find that these warmups will be the start of a database of characters, conversations, and situations that you can pull from as you develop and write your own stories.

Exercise 5 - Listen to Your Story

Another important exercise is simply recording your story on audio and listening back to evaluate its pacing, dialogue flow, and overall coherence. Pay attention to how the narrative unfolds audibly, identifying areas where the pacing needs work and where dialogue resonates authentically. This exercise provides valuable insights into the rhythm of your writing, helping you fine-tune your storytelling for maximum impact on your audience.

By incorporating these writing exercises into your routine, you'll sharpen your narrative skills, deepen character development, and enhance the immersive quality of your stories. Embrace the creative challenges and push yourself to experiment with different storytelling techniques.

- Sasha LeFleur