Those who followed my blog for a while should probably know that I’m a whimsical person when it comes to reading and writing. So that’s my approach to writing exercises if I have to sum it up with one word.
I bounce around with writing exercises in that if I grow tired of one, I switch to another. I tend to not follow other people’s ideas that much, with the vague notion that I’m using them to strengthen my weak spots.
My current writing exercises include the following:
- The omniscient exercise that I blogged about before where I’m translating an omniscient online novel from Chinese to English
- What I call “no obligation” where I made up or sourced random prompts to start off on a story that I give myself absolutely no obligation to finish (and I don’t think I had finished any single story I started for this exercise) which has now evolved into a long lists of remembered moments/recent happenings under the headings “Moments in Time”
- Juxtaposition, an exercise I revived where I used an Excel sheet of 10 columns of words I handpicked, so that I’m generating one random idea per day that might or might not be useable for anything
- 5 For today, an idea from an article that I read as one of the free online writing/self-care courses I did, where I recorded 5 thoughts I had for the day. Currently, it often overlaps with the no obligation “Moments in Time” exercise as they both use the same base for inspiration. I did have a new prompt sitting there for the no obligation exercise but somehow I just kept writing down moments in time instead of starting a new story with that prompt. Not sure if it is lethargy or what.
In the past, I had actually done the following writing exercises:
- The action scenes exercise which leverages on my movie spell. Basically, I was fictionising particular action scenes in movies that I had seen recently. When I stopped with this exercise, I compiled a table of contents grouping scenes by content (running scenes, fighting scenes etc.) so that if I ever became stuck with action scenes, I now have a kind of reference guide where I can copy and paste passages to use as starting points
- The alternate scene exercise where I was using moments out of Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay and rewrite it alternately in first person and third person perspective. Why I used this particular work was simply because I was analysing it at the moment, mistakenly believing that it was written in omniscient form but it turned out to be written in third person limited with an omniscient narrator voice
- The empathy exercise that I took off some source that I had forgotten about now, where I pegged that I was writing from a Chinese point of view in ancient times. Then on each day I would create a character that has three components: gender, occupation, descriptor. Some examples were: A decadent Emperor; A sensitive female prostitute; A scholar with a fixated way of thinking etc. I would write 100 words or so showcasing a given character
- The sensory details exercise, aiming to increase my capability to make concrete sensory details. I would come up with three adjectives under each of the six senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and perception at a time. On each day, I pick up two senses and come up with two short paragraphs on each adjective
- The sun, moon and star exercise: I’ve just noticed that I’m drawn to the three heavenly bodies and so I basically cycle through them and write a short paragraph about each every day. I think it shortly dies out because after a while, it is very hard to be original
And that’s it in terms of writing exercises. Until next time.
Moonlake's Fiction Space 