Even if you love writing, it’s not always easy to stay inspired. So we’ve put together some of our favourite writing exercises to help you put pen to paper.
- Open whatever you are reading and pick a line. This is your first line and you have ten minutes to write from there. Often, the hardest thing is starting. So let someone else do that for you! This exercise can also mean starting somewhere you wouldn’t usually start which might mean finishing somewhere unexpected too.
- Use a photo book or a tool such as Flickr’s random image generator to find a photo. This is the hero image of your film. Then use a random word generator to create your title. Where do these two randomly generated images and text intersect to form a story?
- Listen to other people. We overhear great slices of conversation all the time – sentences caught on the street, phone calls shared with the rest of the upper deck of the bus on the way home. Get your notebook out, or pull up the Notes app on your phone, and write these snippets down. When you get home take one of these lines and use it as a starting point for a piece of dialogue or a character. See where they can take you!
- Every character you write will have a different backstory, a different voice, different drives. It can be easy to end up writing repetitive characters informed by the people around us, so it’s important to keep challenging yourself to think about different people’s experiences and how different people might speak. If you can, take yourself to a local art gallery (the National Portrait Gallery in London is completely free to go to) and sit in front of ten different portraits and write character profiles for each of them. Then pick two of the characters you’ve just created and see what happens when they meet. If you don’t have a gallery near you, look for faces wherever you can find them: on adverts at bus stops, on hair dye boxes, the person sitting across from you on the train. There are potential characters everywhere!
- Place can shape a story. Pick three unusual locations and write a scene in each of them. How is a confession of love changed by taking place on a mountaintop or in a basement that your characters are trapped in? You could write new scenes or try rewriting scenes from your current project in new spaces and see what that brings to these scenes that you can then take back into your work in progress.
We hope these exercises inspire you to start a new project, get ideas flowing or keep going on your current project. Good luck!