i’ve been thinking about practising writing and so just some ways to do it if you’re interested…these aren’t always fun and it’s not like you have to do them to be a good writer, but here are some things i’ve done that have helped me:
one scene story. basically, i get a plot of a short story. any short story, could be one that you wrote or can imagine. something about 10 pages long, 5k-10k words, you know, something you might read in one sitting. but when you’re starting out you might want to start with something shorter.
anyway, you then condense it into one scene. this scene can be as long as you want, but it can only be one. so you can write 10k words describing a dead body from a 1k word story, but it’s only that one scene. you want to tell bits of the story in other places. in description, in thoughts. try to make it good, readable, workshop-able.
description drills. i stole this from art. either sit in a public area or get a site to generate images and describe people and things. you’re looking to spend about a minute on each thing, and you want to be able to conjure what you’re writing about later.
if you get good at physical description, or you’re already good at it, or you just want to change, try to tell a story in your descriptions. pick out the pieces of a person that tell you who they are and make sure those are what you write down.
emotion wheel. i had a list of emotions and a list of body parts and facial features and i would combine them randomly. what does someone’s hand do when they’re angry? what about when they’re resigned? sad? happy? how about their feet? how does their posture change?
unlike the previous exercise, you want to keep these constrained to one character. think it through. if you’re writing a story about characters, especially if you have a lot of protagonists, making sure these things distinguish them is important.
epithets. okay, this is where it starts to get less fun. this one is hard for me. you’re not allowed to use pronouns (for characters). the purpose is to describe characters physically and emotionally and distinguish them through that. it’s fine to use epithets to start.
eventually, you do want to start to move away from that, but it’s OK if you can’t completely eliminate it, because it’s very difficult. don’t try to write too much for this, you want like 500 words or less.
joint work. this one uses a friend. so if you’re good at dialog and bad at action or vice versa, and you have a friend with the opposite problem (or who just likes this sort of thing), you each take like 10 minutes to write half of a scene. either all dialog and no action, or vice versa. then you swap, and fill in a scene around it.
you should probably be writing fanfic for this one so you have shared characters, but as long as you both know who the characters are, you don’t have to. you want to get it to the point where what fits into a scene is what you basically expected. bonus round? neither of you can name what character is doing what.
eliminations. a few takes on “kill your darlings.” you do things like write short stories and remove the main character, or remove the climatic page, etc. you then repair the story, but you can’t replace what you took out directly.
you can also throw it into a word frequency analyzer and pick your most common word (that’s not the, he, she, said, etc) and just delete every sentence containing it.
plotting. also uses a friend. you describe the plot of a book one sentence at a time, and they have to guess. you obviously can’t say names that would give it away.
the point is to learn what drives a story, what is essential. you don’t win by them guessing it on your first sentence. you win when you figure out how you think about story structure.
linear time. write a story, any story, with a then/now. alternate between them until it works.
characters. just. make page after page of character descriptions. until you’re sick of it. and then keep going. make them all distinguishable. until you can’t think of anything else, and then keep going.
and then go and get angry every time someone says “every character is the writer teehee” because they clearly don’t know what they’re talking about.
random words. a vocabulary builder. find a random word generator - make sure it’s a good one with a lot of different words. i used MW’s word of the day emails, they’re all saved in a pile, and word of the day calendars.
yeah, you guessed it, write a short story with the word.
iteration. this is my last one, because it’s the most boring. write a short story. read it a day later, make notes about everything good and bad. then write it again.
rinse and repeat. if you get sick of this story? keep using it. you’re accomplishing a few things here. one: you get a hopefully well written story by the end of it. two: you’re training yourself to write even when you’re not inspired. three: you’re learning what tropes you over use, what works and what doesn’t, what types of phrases stick in your head.
obviously, this doesn’t count if you just edit the previous story. you have to actually start from scratch.
i recommend a length of around 1k words. that’s about an hour of writing for me, and when you’re writing the same story, the speed will pick up. the length isn’t important, though. what’s important is you keep writing.
so yeah uhh if you want some specific ideas for a variety of problems, i own a lot of writing work books and the like and have done a lot of exercises and can probably suggest something.
