10 minute writing challenge1/26/2024 Some other impressive effects of this particular exercise are the amount of ideas this generates alone for the rest of the work. It can even open up things you didn’t know about the story at first, pushing you to research things you didn’t before, make sentences stronger and more intentional, find the center and “point” of the narrative. What this will do is show the parts of the narrative that are needed, and the ones that are not. Edit it at least 10 times, noting the changes along the way. Developmental editing is really about bringing the experience together, so every change should get you closer to that initial intention, or to a discovery of something new while in the process.īegin edits and revisions for just the first chapter. Revisions and edits can be limitless, but some of the most basic edits include rearranging sentence structures, adding/taking out words, readjusting literary elements like character or theme, or getting closer to the original goal of the project. If you have a longer work you’ve been working on, this is the perfect way to revisit the story and/or revamp it entirely. One should still prioritize an editor you trust, but editing yourself to get it as close to completion as possible is an essential skill as a writer. Revising and editing are arguably some of the most important aspects of developing your work into something readable and intentional. Goal: Improve developmental editing skills to create the best versions of your work. Exercise: Edit the first chapter of any story you have. Spend at least 30 minutes on this exercise. You can create several sets of plot points with this one line, taking the story in different directions every time. This is a fundamental building block of any writer who wants to get back to basics, and understand how different events and when/how they happen can affect the feeling and flow of the story. This will help develop our sense of what is actually happening in the narrative. Goal: Enhance your writing through the usage of the plot device.įinish plot points for a short story with the first line: “He was waiting to get onto the stage.” Recommendation: Write out an intention to receive a stream of new ideas the night before a writing session. Put on some nice music, get comfortable in your writing area, and write freely without thinking for at least 10 minutes. It is in these possibilities that you activate the part of your mind that is dormant with a predominant logical thinking culture, the part that can do whatever it wants. Stretch your imagination to dream up your wildest potential experiences that were avoided because “real life” got in the way, or because you just simply made a different choice. The exciting, confusing, or the unimaginable. This is a free-writing prompt to explore the fantasies of alternate realities in your own life. ![]() Goal: Stretch the imagination in storytelling. Prompt: Write about something you couldn’t do in real life, but wanted to. Structure and sentence is often under-looked at times, so this is a way to get us back to the nuts and bolts of writing.Ĭhoose an idea for a sentence of something happening, and write it in ten different ways. Once we know our story, it will never matter if we cannot articulate it to have the impact we want. This allows you to analyze which sentence has a certain effect on you as a reader, and decide if that is how you wanted to say it. This is a technical exercise, pushing you to explore rhythm, structure, grammar, and how you can say things in so many ways. ![]() Exercise: Write the same idea in 10 different sentences. How do we go beyond writing aimlessly to intentionally? Let’s explore exercises and prompts that can help open our world as writers. ![]() All of these things require time and patience. It’s our knowledge of how to write creatively from a very fundamental level with foundational writing techniques and tools. It is our critical eye, our empathy, our ability to tell interesting stories, our knowledge of literature and the things we’ve read. Prompts that stimulate the imagination and not push us further from it. There are many prompts out there, but some are more effective than others. There is a better way to reach our writing goals. We are told to write everyday, but besides dropping random words on a page until you get something extraordinary, most writers are often stuck in a cycle of comfortability. How do we create our training montages for the mind, our inspiration sessions, our greatest creative moments? It starts with building up our skills, but how? There are books full of prompts and writing exercises all over the internet for generating ideas and improving our writing, and yet none of them feel intimate enough, specific enough to what writers are trying to build. Six writing exercises to generate ideas for your story & improve writing
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