Why Writing Exercises?

Some writers dislike them.  Others despise them. Some find them boring and a waste of already too-limited writing time. Others see them as too restrictive, taking the writer far away from where he really wants to be: home with his own settings and characters; his own conflicts; his own carefully woven plots and subplots.

Believe me, I hear you.  I don't want to leave home either.  That's why I choose exercises that work for almost any project-in-progress, be it short story, novel, or memoir. You'll be surprised how easily almost every exercise here can be tweaked to work for your particular story and characters.

What I really love about writing exercises is how they take me out of that dreaded state of mind in which everything is expected to come out perfect on the first pass, or as John Gardner would describe it: that dark psychological mindset with the ghost of the young James Joyce standing horribly at your back.  I hate that mindset.  I love how exercises loosen me up and get me to examine problematic passages from a whole new perspective.  I love to steal delicious passages from the novels and authors I admire and try to do something similar in my own scenes.  Josip Novakovich, author of the wonderful Writing Fiction Step by Step says:

I have yet to apply an exercise to a passage in my own fiction that failed to improve it exponentially.  After  focusing for some time on one particular element of craft, the passage is always richer for the time spent; more textured, more nuanced; better in every way.  I encourage you to research this phenomenon for yourself.  As John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction:

When the beginning writer deals with some particular, small problem, such as description of a setting, description of a character, or brief dialogue that has some definite purpose, the quality of the work approaches the professional.

Now who wouldn't want to strive for that?

~

Josip Novakovich, Writing Fiction Step by Step

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction

Movement through Space

~

Here's an exercise almost everyone can use:  How to give the reader a sense of movement through space and time as your characters travel from one destination to another.  In The Folding Star,  by Alan Hollinghurst, two friends leave the city in a convertible to drive to a beach house several hours away. As they leave the city and head for the coast you can almost feel the wind in your hair and the city disappearing in the rearview mirror behind you:

I panicked again under the huge sweep of sky that opened up. The city was suddenly behind us; I looked back, and above the warehouses and estates the cluster of extravagant towers rose into view again;  they became the city; then they dwindled and were blurred in haze.  We were leaving fast, the engine was shouting, the wind tore over the windshield and whipped the hair about on top of my head. I wanted to be back where we'd come from…

There was a certain brown obscurity in the sky ahead, like rain falling out to sea.  Matt was wearing bottle-green dark glasses and frowned as he drove.  A few miles later it lifted and dissolved; and the further we went the more radiant and old-masterly the air became, so that the whole mad, worrying escapade began already to feel out of time, steeped in a dream-ether of its own.

In Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, the main character describes a carpool ride to school in seventh grade:

I'm looking out the window [of the station wagon] while Mrs. Drexel's cigarette uncoils a rope of smoke.  We head into the heart of Grosse Pointe.  We pass long, gated driveways, the kind that always fill my family with wonder and awe…  We rumble past privet hedges and under topiary arches to arrive at secluded lakefront homes where girls wait with satchels, standing very straight.  They wear the same uniform I do, but somehow it looks different on them, neater, more stylish.  Occasionally there is also a well-coifed mother in the picture, clipping a rose from the garden. 

And again, a couple of months later:

The car is full of girls. Mrs. Drexel is lighting another cigarette.  She's pulling up to the curb and getting ready to lay a curse on us.  Shaking her head at the view -- of the hilly, green campus, the lake in the distance -- she says, "Youse girls better enjoy it now.  Best time of life is when you're young." (At twelve, I hated her for saying that.  I couldn't imagine a worse thing to tell a kid…"

I love how those authors show us more than just movement through a particular setting. They give us their characters' emotional reactions to the experience as well.

Alan Hollinghurst: The Folding Star
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex