Creativity Kick-starters

Whether you’re looking to sharpen your skills, develop your craft, or simply spark some inspiration, here are a handful of writing exercises to help you tell great stories. Note that these exercises are aimed toward my fellow fiction writers.

Plot Exercises

• Create a timeline: Map out the major events of your story on a horizontal timeline. This can help you to both organize events and identify if there are any plot holes.

• Write a one-page synopsis: This is something that agents will ask you for once you start querying your work. I won’t go into the specifics of how to write a synopsis here, but I will advise you to be strict about keeping it to ONE PAGE ONLY. This forces you to get to the heart of your story and clarify what it your story is really about.

  If you would like guidance in how to craft a novel synopsis, I recommend you check out Jane Friedman’s post on the subject and Susan Dennard’s excellent guidelines (she provides a very helpful Star Wars exemplar).

Character Exercises

Take a personality test for your character: This might sound silly, but it can be really fun to get inside your character’s head this way. I recommend the 16 Personalities free test.

Write scenes that happen before your story: Unless you are starting your story at the moment of your protagonist’s is birth, then your character is going to have a backstory. Reading Lisa Cron’s Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) opened my eyes to how important a character’s past is to their present story. They are who they are on the pages of your book because of their life experience before the book begins. Spend some time thinking about how they became who they are on page one. What were the key moments in their life that have shaped their personality? It may be helpful to write these as scenes, even if they never make it into your book.

Identify your characters’ imperfections: If your characters are human, then they’re messed up in one way or another. Even your good guys have flaws. No one wants to read about a gallingly perfect—and therefore unrelatable—goody two-shoes. (The only type of characters that I am personally okay with coming across as sort of perfect are the old mentor characters—the ones that have lived a long time and have developed a great deal of wisdom. Of course, they’re not perfect anymore than the rest of us, but the reader knows that they’ve had quite a bit of time to work through their issues, and it therefore makes sense that they are more able to function on a more elevated level than everyone else.)

If you’re having a hard time identifying your characters’ shortcomings, it might help to imagine them as mythical heroes or Shakespearean protagonists. If you had to pick just one fatal flaw for them, what would it be? Once you’ve identified the big one, you can use it as a springboard.

This is not to say that you need to spend lots time meditating on your characters’ shortcomings; however, you should be aware of them so that you can write your characters in a way that is realistic and relatable. If you want your characters to seem like actual people, then their flaws will affect the way the plot unfolds. After all, that’s what happens in real life.

Put your characters in situations and see what they do: Come up with a list of scenarios—they needn’t be anything that actually happens in your story—and write down what your characters would do if they found themselves in those situations. Trap them in an elevator. Have them lock their keys in the car. Take them camping. Put them in the middle seat on a long flight. Every detail you come up with will not only help you to get to know your characters better, it will also provide you with some excellent scene ideas to draw from when you are writing the main story.

Setting

Write from photographs: Look for actual photographs of the setting of your story—or if your setting is a fictional world, look for comparable real-world places. I have done this a number of times when looking for inspiration or when trying to describe the setting with believable detail.

Pick key details: I don’t usually enjoy reading or writing long descriptions of setting. They can be well done, but they can also get boring fast. Try selecting 3–5 key details to describe your setting, then think of ways to make them interesting, either by using vivid vocabulary (just not too long and dribbly), or adding a bit of humor or suspense.

Theme

Come up with a key image or symbol: Having a recurring visual motif woven through your story can help your reader to latch onto a greater sense of meaning/significance. It could be a certain colour, object, or thing in nature (fire, wind, etc.). It could also be a sound instead of an image, or even a feeling. Whatever symbol you choose (and you can have more than one), it should communicate an underlying message in your work. If you enjoy art, I recommend sketching or painting your chosen symbol(s).

Try answer the following questions: What do you want to say to your characters? What do you want to say to your readers? Chances are, your answers to these questions are closely connected with the theme of your work and can help you to stay focused on what really matters to you instead of getting distracted or bogged down by other superfluous details.

Have fun, and happy writing!