Exercises for Writers: Developing Style and Imagination

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Writing is hard work and maybe not for everyone. A sense of style, rhythm, style can hardly be learned, it can hardly be comprehended. This is the so-called talent, a feature that is given to a person at birth. However, even talent is worthless without due diligence and aspiration. It cannot completely replace the need for diligent and painstaking work. Therefore, to develop the skills of beautiful writing, special exercises for writers have long been invented.

Building a story from a photo

Of course, the peculiarities of the author's style, beautiful and attractive style, vivid metaphors, epithets, hyperbole and other literary tropes attract the reader's attention. Perhaps even give him aesthetic pleasure. The text should be outwardly pleasing, literary elements seem to be its necessary component, but the most important thing in it is still the underlying meaning and idea. An effective exercise for writers on the imagination is to create plots based on a randomly selected photograph. You must select a picture or photograph from which you canpull out an interesting story and describe it.

The exercise itself should begin with the initial evaluation of the image: to understand what is happening and with whom, in what period of time. Then it is worth thinking about what connections can be between the existing objects and characters, what happened before them and how events will develop in the future. In order to complicate the task, you can try to write your story in different genres: from drama to comedy, from fantasy to detective story.

Work on characters

In a literary work of art, all characters can be divided into two broad categories: deeply developed and flat, unpretentious. If the former are usually in the center of events and play the main roles, then the latter are needed mainly to convey some idea, thoughts, to continue or change the plot. Minor characters are considered important within the storyline anyway. Therefore, the following exercise is proposed: to create a sheet, a table of the heroes of the work. It is necessary to describe in a couple of sentences their external features, character traits, possible phrases that will appear in the dialogue. Think about what role they could play in the work, what to answer and do in a certain situation. Then all the recorded characters can be gradually included in the plot, filling the script with them, developing it.

Sitting in a restaurant or cafe, standing at a bus stop or being in public transport, you should always pay attention to the people around you,because all this grasped, imprinted in the memory of a variety of behavior, types and speeches will make the narrative more concentrated and rich. Characters should be described through their own actions. Even from a banal walk, cleaning, cooking, work, you can learn a lot about the character, draw your own conclusions and form an impression about him. The dialogue between the two characters will also tell a lot. As a useful exercise for writers, you can make small sketches of a couple of hundred words about the environment in which the character is located and which reflects his actions.

Working on style

It implies not so much the selection of one's own author's style (which comes with experience), but the purification of the literary language from parts of speech that pollute it. To do this, there is a curious exercise, named after Mark Twain - "According to Twain." The writer himself has always opposed the excessive use of adjectives and adverbs in the text, because he believed that they blur and fade the written. It is worth noting that other writers took a similar opposing position in relation to these parts of speech: Voltaire, E. Hemingway, S. King.

The very essence of the exercise is simple and consists in not using adjectives and adverbs when writing works of art for several weeks, months. The priority parts of speech in the text should be the noun and the verb. After practicing for a while, you can look at the result and evaluatedifference in their work. This exercise for writers can be made a little easier if, for example, there is not enough free time to complete it. It is enough to take your old works and save them from being loaded with adjectives and adverbs.

Examples of simple and effective exercises

There are more than a hundred exercises aimed at developing writing talent. Many of them seem simple at first glance, but in fact, being quick to complete, they improve creativity.

Stories and monologues. Probably, many have heard about such strange exercises for beginning writers as "tell about an empty glass" or about some blue object. It is also effective practice to write monologues from the perspective of, for example, a spoon that has fallen into the dishwasher, or from the perspective of a freshly cut flower

Stories by keywords. Creative thinking can be developed through writing short stories built on initially given random words. They can be from completely different categories: dog, shuttle, ice, well, commander. The more extravagant the story, the better

Giving reasons. How to become a writer? First of all, you need to learn how to answer any questions and give unusual explanations for the most banal things. For example, let's say, as an exercise, for 8 reasons, you can cite such situations and events as: an unexpectedly wide open door at home, a school teacher is determined to change his profession to a geologist, a person justifies a liar

General conclusion

Re althe writer is inseparable not only from his diverse experience, but also from the ability to think creatively and imagine. Talent, of course, plays an important role in writing, but the one who is persistent in his work becomes a real creator. As with athletes, regular exercise is a must for writers. You need to work all the time on plot points, on the appearance and character of the characters, on the literary and your own author's style. It will not be superfluous to write short stories or chaotic monologues from time to time. Everything should be aimed at developing style and extraordinary thinking.