A lot of budding writers get stuck trying to get some words onto a page. There are lots of ways to get over this. Some people need a brute-force, kick-up-the-butt approach. For those people, and anyone else who wants to smash some words out, I’ve put together a pile of simple, fast, easy creative writing exercises. If you do them all, minus reading time you’ll end up with ~3,400 written words in about two hours.

Here are some links to the exercises. Or you can read on for some more explanations.
1: The Diamond Studded Potato Peeler
2: Lazy Sunday Afternoons
3: There Was This One Time…
4: .sdrawkcab yrots a lleT
5: Wait, I’ve Got An Idea
6: I Lied
7: Brian Jacques Accepts Your Invitation To Dinner
8: Mind That Bus!
9: The Tour-De-Force
10: Eenie Meenie…
(Bonus!) The Golden Candy Bar

What I’m going to do is list ten different creative writing exercises that you’re welcome to use. They are designed to be quick, easy, fun creative writing exercises. Don’t expect soul-wracking or nervous revisions. The idea is to have fun, be fast, and keep moving. Write. Think. Write more. Don’t analyse. Take your fingers off your ‘delete’ key.

These exercises are going to be simple. I want to warm up your writing fingers, not freeze you out with complicated restrictions.

Most of these creative writing exercises are designed to get you writing within a few minutes, or even seconds. Why? Because the more complex I make them, the more tempted you’ll be to sit back and go ‘huh, yeah, I cold approach this these ways…’, and before you know what’s happening, you’ve spent five minutes farting about instead of writing.

I don’t want you to over-analyse what I’m going to get you to do. This is one of the big problems with creative writing exercises – you spend too much of your time going “Hmm, this is how I’d write about this”, and not enough time actually doing it. Theory is all well and good. There’s a lot of it out there. I encourage you to read it, in your spare time. Time spent reading about writing theory is not the same as time spent writing. At the end of every day what counts is how much you’ve written, not how much you’ve thought about it.

For those reasons, I’m going to list the exercise first, very briefly. Open up a word document, or, better yet, go and get a copy of Write or Die and get yourself ready. Read the limit on words and time. Read through the description. Immediately flip over and begin writing. Treat it as the first few minutes of a test you’re excited to be taking.

Heck, it is a test! It’s a test of willpower. Of how much writing you can get done in this session. Of what ideas you can give birth to. Don’t wimp out. When you’re done, you can zip through my thoughts underneath, or head right on to the next one. I leave the choices up to you, but it’s probably better to try and get ‘on a roll’ with the writing exercises until you’re completely pooped, then go and reward yourself with a nice bit of reading. If you read analysis in between each exercise, your brain will slip out of that ”creative zone, and it’ll be harder to get back in!

Do the exercises in order. If you don’t finish them all in one go, that’s absolutely fine. Maybe try one or two a session until they’re all done. Treat them as a warm-up. Don’t skip through to your ‘favourite’ unless you’ve done them all at least once. No peeking ahead!

OK. Enough introduction. Ready? Here we go.

Creative Writing Exercise #1

“The Diamond Studded Potato Peeler”
Look around the space you’re in. Find an object smaller than a fridge and focus your intelligence on it briefly. Imagine a situation where that object is vitally, life-savingly important. It is intensely valuable. Write a 500 word story about it in 20 minutes or less. Go!

How does it feel having been thrown in the deep end? I was introduced to this by one of my favourite creative writing teachers, who used to bring ‘prop bags’ into class with him. Some of my favourite stories I wrote as a kid were about rubber gloves, balls of wool, scientific calculators, pendulums and Frisbees.

By taking ordinary objects and suddenly elevating their importance, you break out of the molds you’ve given yourself. Normal thinking is great for normal life. When you’re writing, break thought patterns when you can. Forge new connections, however strange and ungainly they may seem.

Creative Writing Exercise #2

“Lazy Sunday Afternoons”
Think of a profession and a hobby that don’t normally go together. Make someone be extremely proficient at both of them. A virtuoso, unparalleled. Tell me all about them.
300 word character description, 10 minutes, GO!

This is another exercise designed to de-rail you. With this one, you’ve probably pulled a reasonably ordinary profession and a potentially interesting hobby. After all hobbies are going to be interesting to those who do them, aren’t they?

Have a quick look at what you wrote. Why did you choose the profession you did? How did your character become the best in the world at it? Could they be so good, that there was something… Odd about them?

Nobody raises an eyebrow at accountants who’re good with numbers. What about accountants who can see numbers before they exist? Who can extrapolate lines of numbers and pull out hidden meanings and codes that nobody else is aware of? Anything can be taken to an ‘extreme’ if you’re willing to stretch your mind a little.

Creative writing exercise #3

“There was this one time…”

Recall a story you’ve been told. Anything that interested you at the time, enough you can recall it now. It could be your story or someone else’s. The first one that comes to mind.

I want you to re-tell it, except fill it with hyperbole. The plane didn’t come down in bad weather, it got struck by lightning and landed in the middle of a combined earthquake and hurricane. The luggage wasn’t lost, it was stolen by corrupt baggage-handlers and used in an illicit diamond-smuggling campaign. Your parents didn’t meet on an awkward blind date, they met on a blind-dating game show, and won.

I don’t care how you do it, I just want it to be bigger, better, more bad-ass than real life.
750 words. 20 minutes. Go!

We all come from long histories of oral storytelling. Until comparatively recently, most people were illiterate. Telling a story well was a talent admired and useful to everyone. Me, I’m a crazy storyteller. I appropriate stories from everywhere I go – mythology, other people’s conversations, my own life.

I love telling stories bigger than they were, tacking on the gruesome, naughty, hyperbolic, explosive details and tangents that make stories truly epic. Nobody’s interested in your train trip to work. Everybody’s interested if the train is held up by bandits. Nobody might believe me if I’m telling them a story that stretches the limits of believability, but that’s not the point of why we tell stories. it’s to entertain, and that’s what I want you doing with this.

Creative Writing Exercise #4

“.sdrawkcab yrots a lleT”

This is going to be fast. Don’t over-think this. Take a story you know well. It can be any story. Reverse the plot. Make events run backwards. Summarise it for me. Re-arrange the story to have it make as much sense as possible.

Gollum emerges from the the crack of Mount Doom holding a ring. He is beaten up by Frodo, who steals the ring and escapes down the mountain with Sam. They escape from Mordor and adventure back to the Shire…

250 words. 5 minutes. Go!

That might have been a little weird for you. That’s OK. Most narratives don’t hang together when you do them backwards. The point wasn’t to build an elegant story, the point was to spark your brain off with a few more creative ideas.

Forcing things to run backwards makes you come up with reasons for actions that seem perfectly straight-forward when they’re happening forward… You can justify things by outside memories, events, changes in personality… Eurgh. You can see why I didn’t want you to over-think it.

Creative Writing Exercise #5

“Wait, I’ve got an idea…”
Halfway there! Ok, this one’s a doozy. I want you to list thirty different things that are really cool, that you’d love to write about if you could fit them in somewhere.
It could be anything.
Time travelling octopuses.
Space-monkey-butlers.

Don’t worry, these don’t need to be cohesive. No tricks, I promise. Just think of things that make you go “YEAH!” Quickly now. One idea every ten seconds. You can’t afford to let your fingers stop moving.
Take a deep breath.

30 ideas. 5 minutes. Go!

The last ones are always a struggle. You need to jump from idea to idea like an armoured frog over a minefield. This is about getting juices fired up and working. I don’t care what you came up with. Armour-plated frogs, eh? Cool.

Creative Writing Exercise #6

“I Lied.”
One of my favourite parts in writing history comes from an excellent episode of Red Dwarf, called “Justice”. The main character, Lister, is meeting up with a psychotic android at a parley. They both advance on each other, slowly.
Lister: You brought no weapons?
Droid: No. You?
Lister: No.
Both characters advance, slowly. Suddenly, the droid pulls out a knife.
Droid: Guess what? I lied.
Lister reaches behind him and bulls out a heavy steel pipe.
Lister: Guess what? So did I.
The droid then reaches behind him again and pulls out a gun.
Droid: Ah, but I lied…. Twice.

And now, dear readers, I’ve lulled you into a false sense of comedic narrative, because
- BLAM -
You have to go and take TWO, that’s right, TWO of the awesome ideas you have from exercise #5 up there and put them into a mini-story, no more than 100 words long.
You have 5 minutes.
What are you looking at me like that for?
Quick. Snappy. Funny. Weird. Poetic. Whatever.
Panic afterwards.
5 minutes. 100 words. Two ideas.
GO.

Pens down, hands off keyboard. Stop glowering. It wasn’t that bad. Remember, you can throw away all this writing in an hour.

OK, forgiven me yet? Just think, we’ve had less than an hour of writing time and already you’ve written over a thousand words – if you did this for a year, you’d writ the equivalent of three full novels.

There’s no deep reasoning behind this exercise. I simply want you off your feet and typing quickly. And if you are writing about ideas you’ve already come up with, then there’s a good chance there are tiny hints of narrative floating around in your brain already.

Creative Writing Exercise #7

“Brian Jacques accepts your invitation to dinner”

Some writers have a propensity to write about food in such a way specifically designed to make you green with food envy. Feasting scenes especially. Whether it’s Hobb, Jacques, a literary feast, random samples of food eating in castle-feasting scenes, it always feels like somebody’s feasting on improbably nice-sounding food. Even Elves – ascetically slim bastards that they are – tend to dine on crystal-clear, ice-chilled wines and delicious fruits with names like Gloryberry and WonderTart.

Enough is enough. Your challenge: Write an improbably, ludicrously overblown feast. Pack as many swarthy descriptions in there as you can. Overload every sentence like the serving trestles of the muncheries that your characters are indulging in. I don’t care how the meal turns out, I don’t care how much indigestion they’ll have in the morning. All I want is a few paragraphs of overblown food descriptions, please.
No thinking, no delete key, get ready.
300 words, 10 minutes. Go!

Ahh, delicious! So, why did we do that?
Well, firstly, it’s good to get that out of your system. I’m not entirely sure how well most of those food passages in books serve to illustrate surroundings, because I’m ALWAYS TOO BUSY SALIVATING. Don’t get too obsessed about it. As well as that, it got your mind in a creative mood, didn’t it? All that suckling pig, crackling and gleaming in candlelight. Liveried waiters, succulent grapes, heady, intoxicating wines…

Not every one of your descriptions needs to be this overwritten. Why do I keep encouraging you to do things to excess? Because, if you write things out without contemplating them in detail, some of the more important elements of storytelling may escape your notice. By making you push the boundaries of writing in good taste, eventually your internal editors will kick in and go “Hey! Maybe the trout dish didn’t deserve that third paragraph devoted exclusively to the preparation of its’ stuffing.”

Normally, I don’t encourage your internal Editor, so let’s just think of it as you developing some natural tolerance limits to overblown writing, and leave it that that.

Creative Writing Exercise #8

“Mind that bus!”

Take three characters from the previous stories. Or other stories. Ones that you weren’t planning on killing. Give them short, sharp, ignominious deaths that fit within their normal settings. Here is the challenge: You must do it in EXACTLY 100 words per character. So that’s 300 words total. No more, no less. 15 minutes total. Ready? Go write!

That was harder than you were expecting, wasn’t it? We need to be both attached and nonattached to our characters. Sometimes, people will do the wrong thing. Fate will conspire against them. They’ll make a mistake. Let their guard down.

Occasionally, your story will demand you put one of your characters down. Sometimes, we need it to be sudden. Not everyone gets a heroic death in battle, complete with speeches and salutes from friends and comrades as they sacrifice themselves. Sometimes, it’s…
“Mind that Dragon!”
“What Dra-”
*FLAME*
SIZZLE
Next chapter.
Never underestimate the shock value of killing people off efficiently. Kill your darlings. If it makes you cry to do so, you’re writing well. If you cackle a little as you do this, then you’re evil enough to continue writing, perhaps full-time! This is an especially important creative writing exercise to try if you’ve never killed before.

Creative Writing Exercise #9

“The Tour-de-Force”

Ah, finally, we’re on to the good parts!

Time to wind down the ol’ brain-muscles. Write a glowing review of your work-to-come. Think of someone you respect a great deal, and imagine the best possible things they could say about your writing. If it’s a book, sum up their glorious endorsement of your book into a few lines. Otherwise, some simple words of praise. Make it as effusive as you’d like. No more than 200 words, please, and only 5 minutes on this one. I don’t want you lost in fantasy-land for too long.

No special reasoning behind this exercise… It’s fun, though, hey! If you come up with something you really like, print it out and stick it up somewhere. Now you have something to work towards.

Creative Writing Exercise #10

“Eenie, meenie…”
Take one of the completed exercises… Copy the text out of it, and make note of the time I gave you.
Than, I want you to cut your total word length in half. Use the same time as originally allotted. So if you started with 1,000 words and 20 minutes, you now need to go to 500 words total in 20 minutes.

Good luck! I’ll see you on the other side.

Hard, huh? It’s not just you.

Hands up if that was the most frustrating exercise so far. That’s understandable. You can guess why I’ve made you do it, though, right? That’s right. Killing off the words that you’ve written is hard, painful. Most (sane) people don’t relish destroying things they’ve created.

Until you’ve finished a piece of work, it’s not really a completed work. Editing is a non-skippable part of that process. And you do want to get your work finished and out there, right?

All those extra words, the ones that hang off sentences like dried fruit clinging to a drying tree? They’re just weighing you down. They’re heavying up your prose. You don’t need them. This is esepcially true of when you’ve been disgorging words to meet some crazy challenge, like NaNoWrimMo word sprints or… Well… Some other creative writing exercises

It’s our nature as writers, especially ones trying to smash words onto the page, to write too much and then need to trim it down later. Don’t neglect the trimming, though.Hardly anyone writes too little and needs to flesh their story out. I want you to habitually trim your word count. As you get better at writing, as you continue developing , you’ll start to be able to edit as you progress.

What I need you to do now, though, is realise that those words are going to go.

Snip.

It hurts a little, but you’re left with a trim, tight, taut and terrific experience at the end of it. If only it was that easy to do to my abs what I do to stories regularly as an editor!

Bonus – Creative Writing Exercise #11

“The Golden Candy Bar”

Well, you aren’t paying for anything, so it’s not really a bonus. But here it is anyway, as a reward for all your hard work so far.

Take one of the exercises previously, the one you like the most. Double it in length. Give yourself the same time as I originally gave you to do so. So if it was 500 words in 10 minutes, you now have to add another 500 words and you have another 10 minutes.

Why doubling? Well, I want you to feel free to own these exercises. They’re your words, after all. Who knows where these could end up? As a chapter in a book? As a short story? A cartoon somewhere? A story you pass on to your readers at a book signing, a theatre performance, an acceptance speech? Something you show people as an example of what you were like when you first started out? Who knows? Who cares! It’s words on a page, and, in this case, it’s something that you get to enjoy working on.

This is simply an excuse for you to go “Yeah, I’m doing another exercise, and this one’s fun!”

That’s it!

What? you’ve made it this far? I hope you’ve done all those exercises. remember, nothing, NOTHING, counts as writing time apart from actual writing. Even though I’m really glad you’ve enjoyed the article – assuming you have! – and I’d encourage you to browse the rest of the site, you need to go write.

Go. Write. Right now. Come back later.
Go Write!
Pip