Monday, December 13, 2010

5 Writing Exercises You Can Do Every Day


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Writing exercises are an invaluable way to keep you writing every single day (even when you really don’t feel like it). There are many different writing exercises that you can do to keep the words and ideas flowing, but here are 5 simple exercises that you can do every day:

One of the best daily writing exercises is journaling. Keeping a journal is an easy way to express your writing goals and ideas. Journaling has been proven to be an effective way to brainstorm when you are at a loss for a writing subject.  Another good writing exercise is to describe a photo. Choose one photo or image each day and write about it. This challenges you to put your visual ideas into words.

You can also commit to writing a daily blog, if you don’t mind letting others read your thoughts. This is a good writing exercise, as long as you focus on quality writing and not on the blog development itself.  Another good writing exercise begins with a good book. Pick a book by your favorite author and take a sentence from it. Use that sentence as the start of a very short story and write one per day.

A fun writing activity is the “fortunately, unfortunately” exercise. Write a line that starts with “fortunately” and then write a line following it that starts with “unfortunately.” Continue this pattern through an entire page of writing. This exercise often makes you laugh, which helps make writing fun again.

These daily writing exercises can be done in less than an hour. Committing at least that much time each day can greatly improve your writing and benefit you as an author. So write on, writer!

3 comments:

  1. The "fortunately, unfortunately" suggestion is great - I just laughed at my own description of yesterday's otherwise-dull events written this way.

    Similar to describing a photo, I find another great exercise is to select a well-read book off the shelf at random and try to describe its complete contents in a short blurb. Taking an author's hard work and chopping it down to a few lines really forces one to choose words well.

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  2. Nice post. I am going to talk about it in my blog!! :)

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  3. Hi Todd...I have enjoyed your tweets and information on writing for over a year now and I must say that this post is one of my favourites. Thank you so much for the suggestions. While I blog daily (or mostly) I haven't focused much on my writing technique while doing so. I love the suggestion about taking the line from a favourite book as well as the "fortunately, unfortunately" exercise. I'll be sure to work on those. Thank you again! Have a wonderful day!

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