By Vanja Kovacic
Doing creative writing exercises is a great way to stretch out your writing muscles and force the muse to come and visit, so to speak. They are also a great way to get over that writer's block that all of us writers experience from time to time, and just to clarify, writer's block is nothing more than falling out of the habit of writing on a daily basis, or getting lazy. Because if you don't nurture the habit of writing everyday you will lose the ability to write well; just as physical muscles diminish if you don't exercise so does the "writing muscle." But rest assured that the talent is still there, it is just a little atrophied.There are many books out there, which offer many and varied creative writing exercises for writers to hone their craft. These writing exercises are usually each aimed at a specific area of creative writing such as characterization and character development, setting, plot, effective descriptions as well as sub-areas like tone, style and others. In other words they are primarily aimed at practicing and perfecting very specific areas of writing.
Another great creative writing exercise is having to write a story or poem by being given a set of random words or phrases, which you must then include in a story, or from which a story must be written. These are not as specific or tailored to the separate creative writing areas as the classic creative writing exercises, but they are perhaps much more suited to triggering your innate creativity and getting the words to flow. And this is essentially the backbone of writing, since it is only once you have mastered the ability to write a complete first drat of a story, poem of flash fiction piece that the more targeted revisions, in terms of setting, plotting and characterization to name a few, come in handy.
Therefore it is advisable to first do some creative writing exercising in the form of writing stories triggered by creative writing prompts and then graduate to the more testing creative writing exercises as proposed in various creative writing textbooks. And if you are suffering from writer's block just push though it by doing as many of these exercises as possible regardless of how bad you think your writing is. With time and effort it will improve, guaranteed.
I am an aspiring fiction writer, freelance journalist and internet entrepreneur. I run two blogs on creative writing, namely Creative Writing Exercises and Creative Writing Guide.
