ON THIS PAGE, YOU WILL FIND AN EVER-GROWING LIBRARY OF FREE EXERCISES FOR WRITERS

The First Spell of Time

Sometimes the hardest thing about getting started is that we do not know what we are getting into. With this simple writing exercise you will learn approximately how fast you write when you achieve flow state, you’ll gain an invaluable tool to reach that state more easily than you have before and you will gain valuable insight into your own process to help you move forward with your writing with newfound confidence and self-determination.

Refining the Descriptive

finding the details and the specifics of the action in a scene obviates the need for excessive description

Go Deeper. Always

An idea can get to the page easily, but until we take time to stay with an it beyond its initial gloss we cannot learn what our instinct has revealed. This exercise deepens our exploration to find the complexities hidden behind first-impulses.

Another Spell of Time

In general, art plays with time in one way or another. Seemingly frozen moments fill museums in painting and sculpture. Decades fit into an eighty-minute film. Music and dance and percussion explore the subdivisions of time. Time, and the ways in which we manipulate it, live deep in the artist’s toolbox. Sometimes, you have to pull these things out and play with them.

Character Needs, Desires and Fears Drive Every Scene

A slow seduction may be driven by animal desire, but it also might be a con, or a power play. It depends on what the characters involved want, and what they fear. When you know what your characters strive to accomplish in a scene, you can write action and dialogue that tell a story a reader can follow.

Memory, Mythology, Misinformation.

We have favorite stories we like to tell about ourselves. Over time, though, they become fictionalized, laden with assumptions and purely subjective implication. Now it’s time to examine the facts of those stories and your own motivations in their revision.

What Truths do we Hide for the Comfort of Others?

People keep secrets. We keep secrets of our own, we keep secrets for one another. We keep secrets as a means of self-protection. Ultimately they crave exposure. Our greatest points of shame can become powerful tools in our fiction-writing tool box.

We Learn from our Heroes

While this idea seems patently obvious, we also forget this. As writers we create heroes from whom others will learn. What do you want your heroes to tell people about their world, about their lives, about their behaviors?