What Makes a Good Writing Exercise?

Some writing exercises are designed as entertainment, an icebreaker at a social gathering of writers and illustrators. These party games are intended to be humorous and usually have an extraordinary number of criteria. I write for my allotted time and find I was able to incorporate a 15-year old male character, fear, the color turquoise, the scent of wet asphalt, five golden retriever puppies and no one-syllable nouns. But somehow, I never got to the melting polar icecaps. That doesn’t matter. The point was to have fun.

At Write Night, our intention is to work on our current projects or explore ideas for future manuscripts. The assignment is simple; the required thought process is complex. Several months ago, Tim Bogar suggested we write a scene in which a secondary character makes the protagonist laugh. I wrote the scene, but it didn’t ring true. By the time this passage evolved into my work-in-progress, the protagonist had stopped laughing. She was hurt and infuriated that a person she idolized would make fun of a real problem in her life. In resolving that conflict, I started to shape the interaction between these two characters.

A good writing exercise is just the push out the airplane. It allows a few moments of glorious freefall before the writer pulls the cord to release the parachute. And then once the parachute opens, the writer must determine what to do if there is no soft, grassy meadow for landing.

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