Writing Exercises

As I mentioned in my post on the 3^rd of March, I have a writing friend. We work on one exercise per week and turn it into flash fiction. I could be a set of words, a situation, an emotion, etc. It’s quite fun and challenging because the exercises involve themes that I might never have tackled otherwise.

These exercises haven’t just been about prose, they are also a very useful creative boost. So much so that I think over the next while a good portion of the flash fiction that I publish will be based on these exercises. It sounds boring, but it is exactly the opposite. Being boxed in actually increases creativity because I need to tell a different kind of story within strict limits.

Where I noticed the biggest improvement is with “show don’t tell”. Important note: I do not strictly adhere to “showing” instead of “telling” because there are situations where I actually prefer to tell and therefore break the rule. However, even when I am determined to show, I noticed that these exercises help me with the subtlety of phrasing. In a nutshell, the exercises are like a creative writing course with the bonus that I will have extra stories to publish. Not everything is publishable (I already screwed up two stories that I can’t fix), but enough of them will be.

I have a Steampunk story slated for this Saturday, but after that I’ll publish one of these exercises. Stay tuned!