Ten More Writing Exercises to Help Your Creative Flow
I have a quote on my desk from Thomas Mann, which states, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Perhaps part of the difficulty of writing is its premier importance to the writer themselves. This difficulty, Mann points out, is characteristic of art-making. Sometimes, I trick myself into sitting down at my desk (or as I describe to my friends, banging my head against a wall) with different approaches to the same difficult task of writing.
Here are some of those techniques (all stolen):
1. 800 Word Breakfasts
Before your day begins and your critical, conscious mind completely wakes, sit down and write 800 words (or pick a different number that’s right for you). Beholden to no project and no person–not even yourself. Try not to predetermine what you will write. Early in the day or maybe late at night, your mind is closer to a dream state where creativity comes from–the unconscious. Personally, I like writing when I get up because I can give myself the opportunity to be terrible. I have the rest of the day to judge myself and grasp for intelligent phrases. Also, how do you protect your work from yourself? My fiction professor recently pointed out that working only on one project every day brainwashes you. You have to forget what you’re writing in order not to destroy the work you’ve been rewriting. By generating other ideas, you distract yourself from your manuscript, which might otherwise receive blunt blows from a self-induced myopia.
2. Day Tripper
During a conference with my beloved nonfiction professor, I expressed my anxiety about my latest project, which I felt I couldn’t get space from. In florid, artist terms, I said it was like running my fingers over polished marble–I couldn’t feel its cracks or weak points. So she suggested revision days. On a revision day, approach your work only to read, tweak and edit. Then take some days off. When you return to it next, call it a generative day. You want to add a section or you’re writing the next chapter. Don’t go back and re-read through what’s already written with a red pen in hand. Leave that to tackle on your next revision day. By switching off, you can take a breather. You can also adjust your expectations and thus your perspective on the piece.
3. Take a Walk
Alright, roll your eyes at this one. Clichéd, for sure, but don’t write! Walk. Walking, it turns out is another way to write. A lot of things, actually, are ways to collect details, which make it into your writing.
4. 10 Openings
Writing beginnings are fun because you haven’t done anything wrong yet. Bang out ten beginnings–all of different lengths and ideas. With a bunch of jumping off points, you don’t have to feel trapped with just one project and you can pull these out when you’re looking for something new.
5. Recursion Therapy
The Argentinian author, César Aira, writes slim, imaginative books and his process, supposedly, is to write short sections each day and end on an absurd last line, a pivot. The next day, when he sits down to continue writing, he uses his last line as his first. He seems an expert un-planner. I’ve only read two of his many books, but they are amazingly compact and interwoven. He may be doing this by means of recursion and consecution–heavy MFA terms, which are fancy ways of saying when you hit a wall, move back to an idea, detail, image or word you’ve already written and then proceed forward. It’s a way to keep going. Perhaps Aira succeeds with the swerves he makes via his bizarre last lines by consecution, in which a previous element recurs and changes meaning, or takes on a new shape in the next scene or chapter.
6. Call Your Mother
In college, as I was writing a research paper on Moby Dick, my mother made the mistake of calling me. I was pissy, stressed and wading those early, icy waters of half-baked theses and secondary sources. When she asked me what my essay was about I kept her on the phone for 30 minutes describing the white whale as a Hindu avatar. She interjected with questions, but mostly she let me pitch my thesis, which helped clarify my ideas. This anecdote is me bragging about the A I received from Professor Vandenburg, but it is also a way of saying, when you’re in the thick of it, try telling someone your synopsis. If you can lead them through your plot or argument or scene you can crystallize your own thinking and see what’s working.
7. Scissor Sisters
If you can print out your manuscript, take a scissor and cut its sections so they are each independent of each other. If you’re working with chapters you can do this by chapter or if you’re writing a more traditional essay, cut each paragraph out. Now, rearrange them. Be open to shifting the linear trajectory and placing sections in an unchronological or strange order. The same beloved nonfiction professor I referenced earlier, suggests this method for building tension and suspense. Perhaps it’s a way of thwarting reader’s expectations of what will come next. Or maybe allowing a question to sit longer before it is answered.
8. Vision Board
A writer’s tools may be words but our subjects are usually not. Building a collection or collage of images related to your subject matter can help you write about them. Check out our essay on how to build a board.
9. Vocab Words
Structure can spur creativity. Try picking a topic, or continuing to write what you’re already working on, and choose ten random words from the page of a book to include in the next section you write. If you get stuck, look up a word’s meaning. We often forget how capricious words can be and the fresh ways we can use them to describe something we’ve never associated them with before.
10. Make it Someone Else’s Problem
Another way of saying, find a trusted reader. One of my friends from workshop last semester is a goddess who understands my writing on a deep, almost creepily accurate level. For this reason, I trust her to read my work with a lot of love and criticism. When she read a short story of mine this summer she told me she understood what a sentence was trying to say, but no one else would–it needed clarifying or cutting. In this way, you have to relinquish your power over your own work. Handing it to an intelligent reader who can tell you what is missing is fun because you don’t have to search for those problems yourself.
