My favorite writing exercises

I'm not a big fan of exercise or practice or maintenance. If I had my way, life would be like a TV show: I'd always look perfectly in shape without doing crunches or holding plank another 10 seconds, my home would be magically clean at all times, and if I wanted to write and perform a song, I'd spend about a minute rocking out to a peppy tune while all the hard work flashed by in a montage. Then -- bam! -- it would be performance time, and I'd be awesome with virtually no revisions or practice time. Naturally, a top A&R guy would be in the audience, and I'd get my big break.

But that's TV! In real life, Autumn Calabrese tells me to do big girl pushups, I run out of underwear pretty quickly if I don't do laundry, and my writing muscles get flabby if I don't work them out, too. So, here are a few of my favorite writing exercises for keeping those word-smithy skills in shape. (See that? It takes a true wordsmith to make up a word like "word-smithy.")

1. The freewrite

Every semester I am surprised by students who have never heard of, let alone tried, a freewrite.

The basics:

1. Pick a topic. Or don't. That's up to you.
2. Set a time limit or a word limit or both.
3. Write without stopping until you reach the time or word limit.
4. No, really. Write without stopping. If that means you write "I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, I don't know what to say, whose idea was this? Why is it so early? Why am I doing this before I've had coffee? I'll never be a writer, I have nothing to say..." then so be it.

Why it works:

Freewriting helps us turn off our inner censor so that we feel okay with writing a horrible first draft or just throwing "dumb" ideas around. Guess what? There's a very fine line between dumb and brilliant, but you have to get that inner censor to be quiet in order to get through dumb to brilliant. Also, if you've ever experienced the phenomenon of not knowing what you want to say about something until you've begun writing then you already understand the power of just stringing words together until something intelligible comes out.

2. Sense-bound object writing

I was introduced to this exercise through the excellent book, Songwriting Without Boundaries by Pat Pattison.

The basics:

1. Pick an object, any object. Or better yet, have someone else pick an object.
2. Follow steps two through four, above.
3. As you write, keep your writing as close to your senses as possible -- that is, you should use language that evokes the sensations of sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, emotion, direction, bodily sensations, etc.

Why it works:

Everyone shares at least most of the same senses. When we learn to write from the senses, our writing becomes instantly relatable and specific, and we might just learn to see (or hear or smell or touch) something in a new way in the process.

3. Forced metaphor combinations

This one is a modification of another exercise from Pattison's book, which you should definitely read if you're interested in this sort of thing.

The basics:

1. Write down a bunch of random nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and put them each in their own pile.
2. Draw one randomly from any two piles. You can also do two nouns if you like.
3. When you have your two words, force them into a metaphorical relationship with one another. You'll get crazy combinations, like "metallic book" (that's an adjective-verb combo); "the book is a ship" (noun-noun combo); and "the book spins" (noun verb combo, there).
4. Think about how you can express one word in terms of the other. In what way is a book a ship? Both a book and a ship are vessels of one sort or another. So you could say that the book's pages whistled from across the room, promising adventurous ports of call in the storyline. You could say that the book provided a safe, cozy hull in which to ride out life's storms. You could say that books carry ideas from place to place like trader ships carry goods.
5. Follow steps two and three in the previous exercise, focusing on drawing out the metaphor you developed in step 4.

Why it works:

If I tell you a book has boring characters and an emotionless plot, the part of your brain that processes information will do its thing, and you'll get the message,  but if I talk about a metallic book -- about characters as boring, flat, and shiny as aluminum siding or of a plot as slick, cold, and flawless as a BMW -- the parts of your brain that process the feeling of cold, smooth metal under your hands will activate, as if you were experiencing the real thing. Metaphor helps your reader to experience what you're saying. Then, for bonus points, your brain connects that experience with the information, making it easier to recall later. Straightforward language is like a good old ink-jet printer; metaphor is an awesome 3-D printer -- for your brain.

If you're into writing, I hope you'll give these tricks a try. You might also be interested in 5 ways to combat writer's block or about how I survived writing a humanities dissertation and lived to tell about it.