Writing Exercise: Leave it to Chance

 

There is a song I wrote that is on my solo/acoustic album, Unsent Letters, called “Leave it to Chance.” When I was writing this song, I knew exactly what I wanted the song to be about, and I had lyric ideas. I didn’t know what chord progression I wanted to use though. I didn’t have a melody either. So I wrote down a bunch of major and minor chords and threw them in a hat. I pulled out three pieces of paper, and that became my chord progression, which helped me find a melody.

Sometimes you just get a little stuck, and you need something to help you get started. This is one of my favorite writing exercises.

1. Take three hats, bowls, or containers. One of them will be for characters, one of them will be for locations, one of them will be for possible conflicts.

2. Write down some characters on small pieces of paper. Here’s a list to get you started:
– a baker who hates toasters
– a female drug addict in her 70s
– a male wedding DJ
– someone who is transgendered
– a teenage boy who can’t drive
– a cat who has insomnia
– a divorced truck driver
– a 20-something guy who only uses rainwater
– a grandfather who lives alone
– a girl who wants to learn how to swallow swords

3. Write down some locations on small pieces of paper. Here’s a list to get you started.
– Nebraska
– London
– Florida
– Chicago
– Texas
– the moon
– a farm
– a high school gym
– prison
– suburbia

4. Write down some potential conflicts on small pieces of paper. Here’s a list to get you started.
– divorce/break up
– someone finds out they were adopted
– someone gets something stolen
– fighting over the last piece of pie
– a snow fight
– someone has to give up an addiction
– someone gets injured
– an incorrect rumor is going around about someone
– an important electronic breaks
– natural disaster
– an asteroid falls from the sky

5. Place all of your pieces of paper in the respective hats or bowls. Draw one character, one location, and one potential conflict. Write a short story, a poem, a short play, a short film, etc. that somehow incorporates all three.

This will force you to be creative. For example, if you get “a cat who has insomnia,” “Texas,” and “snow fight,” that could go so many different ways! (Someone please write that story. I want to read it!)

Variations

– only draw a piece of paper from one category and start your story there
– pick two or three characters and use all of them
– instead of character, location, and potential conflict, you could also use categories like title, a line of dialogue, length of the story, food item that must be incorporated, anything else you can think of!

Obviously, you can come up with an infinite amount of characters, locations, or potential conflicts. This can be a really fun game, and you might end up writing something you never would have written otherwise.

Feel free to post your stories here! I’d love to see what you come up with! Happy writing!

Writing Exercises: Write Something Really Terrible

Photo credit

At a young playwright’s festival once, one of the mentors gave us an assignment. We were all supposed to write the absolute worst 5-minute play we could. We all came up with 5 pages of completely melodramatic crap. We broke all of the rules of playwriting we had been taught. Not only were these plays hilarious, but they definitely helped to take the pressure off and ease the tension.

This is a great exercise because as writers, we sometimes tend to take ourselves a little too seriously (particularly in academic circles). We can be so focused on appearing to be “great writers” for all of our peers that we get so uptight and end up stifling the uniqueness of our own voices, our own styles.

So I say write the worst thing you can think of. If you write fiction, write an awful short story. If you write poetry, write a horrible, cliche poem. If you write plays, write an over dramatic short play. See how good you can be at writing badly. This exercise is a lot of fun, and I guarantee you will make yourself laugh. You may even want to share your work with others.

It will loosen you up. It takes away all of the pressure because it’s supposed to be bad. But when you are finished, you’ll find that it may have just helped you have a better understanding of the “rules” you are breaking. Maybe you’ll have a better understanding of how to craft exposition if you write a scene with horribly unnatural exposition. Maybe you will have a better understanding of the importance of specific imagery if you write a cliche, sentimental poem with no imagery about how sad you are.

So go ahead! See how bad of a writer you can be. It might help you to be a better one.

Writing Exercise : Let The Image Inspire You

Sometimes a simple image can say so much, whether it’s a photograph, a painting, or even a real life image taking place before your eyes. Have you ever seen two people embracing at the airport? Have you ever seen a bored couple sitting at a table at a restaurant, hardly speaking to each other? Have you ever watched a little kid staring at the world around him in complete wonder and awe? Did you make up stories about these people in your head when you saw them?

This is an example of using your imagination to create a story, which is exactly what I’m asking you to do here. I have done many exercises like this. Sometimes it’s just a fun exercise, and sometimes it leads me to characters or stories that I expand on and write a much longer piece about. So here you go.

Writing Exercise

Pick one of the following images. Look at it for at least five minutes without writing anything. What does the image make you think of? What does the image make you feel? What could the story be behind the image? What’s going on behind the camera or behind the scenes? What can you not see? Think about these questions, jot down some ideas, and then write a 2-4 page story, a 2-4 page play, or a 25-50 line poem inspired by what you saw/felt/thought of by looking at these images.

Feel free to post your exercises or links to your exercises here in the comments!

Image One:

Candle Light 2 by Sinned-angel-stock on DeviantArt

Image Two:

Phone by Oliver-Sherret on DeviantArt

Image Three:

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Friends by ncode on DeviantArt

Related articles

• Try these writing (and reading) exercises to hone your skills (onewildword.com)
• Writing From The Heart (theheartofwriting.wordpress.com)
• On Writing: Conversations (thinkinglazy.wordpress.com)

Writing Better Dialogue

As a playwright, the thing I focused on the most in grad school was dialogue. 

Whether you’re writing a play, a story, a film, a poem, etc., you can reveal so much about a character simply by the way she talks and the things she says. Here are just a few things to think about when you’re writing dialogue.

Subtext

In real life, people don’t always say what they mean. So why would your characters? This is a big one for playwrights. I always think about this scene in Annie Hall when talking about subtext.

One of the keys to writing better dialogue is to understand what the subtext is in the conversation. One good exercise is to go through each line of dialogue a character says and answer the following questions:

1. Why is this character saying this?
2. What does he really mean?
3. What is he trying to accomplish in the conversation by saying this?

Voice

The way a person speaks is as unique as his or her fingerprints. If you go to a coffee shop and listen to people speaking, you will quickly realize that everyone has a different tone and a different way of speaking. Everyone has their own way of phrasing things. So should your characters! The way a character speaks can reveal her cultural background, where she is from, how much education she has had, and many more aspects of who she is as a person.

One thing I like to do when I’m revising is to go through and make sure that each character has a unique sound. In playwriting workshops, my professors always told me that you should be able to look at a line of dialogue and know who is speaking just by reading the actual line. This helps to make your characters sound distinctive.

I would say this is a good exercise for fiction, too. Also with fiction, there’s a whole other level to play with if you’re writing in first person. Does your narrator speak the way he thinks? Perhaps he uses a lot of explicit words in his inner dialogue but tries to present himself as being proper when he is speaking. Already, you have told us a ton about who this guy is just by the tone of his dialogue versus the tone of his inner dialogue.

Exercises

Here are a few exercises that are good for focusing on dialogue.

• Eavesdropping – Go to a public place like a coffee shop or the mall. (Airports are GREAT for this!) Sit in one place and listen to the way people are speaking as opposed to what they are actually saying. Pay attention to dialect. Do they pronounce certain words differently? What can you infer about them just by listening to the way they speak?
• Playwriting 101 – Try writing a short scene (2 – 4 pages) with two characters where each person wants something different from the other person. Don’t use any stage directions. When you are finished, go back and write out the subtext of each line of dialogue. This exercise will be great for fiction writers, but even if you’re an experienced playwright, it’s always great to sharpen your tools.