Improve Your Writing More Quickly
By Christian Greene
A lot of people's experiences of creative writing exercises were from highschool English classes; where their teacher might describe how to begin and afterwards maybe follow up with an occasional prompt or two. The structure of these exercises can often be, "Say this, now make something up, now say this"
It didn't simply not teach you anything, it also confined your creativity on top of that - the worst of both worlds.
Can it be any wonder then that many writers today would not give creative writing exercises the time of day? They had been bored senseless by them!
Which is very unfortunate, mainly because these exercises can actually deliver numerous advantages, and provide you with the knowhow to improve your writing skills drastically - when they're done properly.
You see, the way that your high school teacher tried to walk you through those exercises was plainly uninspiring (except perhaps for those of you who had the uncommon fortune of a good teacher). They could very well have been merely waiting for the bell to ring so that they could take another nap in the teachers' lounge.
So, just how should they be done?
Well, for starters, they require direction and purpose. The objective of your high school exercises were to write a story. However I'm sure we can recognize that to create a story, one dosen't actually require an exercise.
The objective of such an exercise then, should be to perform a really specific writing skill in a fashion that challenges that skill and pushes you to improve it.
It's by doing this that you're able to target one of your sticking points, then another, then yet another, and so on and so forth, having the all around outcome of improving the calibre of your writing piece by piece, skill by skill - and not just writing a story for the sake of writing a story.
So now we know the rewards. However, you may be thinking, "great, but that still doesn't seem like a great deal of fun."
But once again, that probably is more about the way that your old highschool teacher presented them back in the day. Creative writing exercises really can be fun and drastically improve your writing at the same time.
A thing many people resented about them was the restrictions placed on their creativity by these types of exercises, when you're told what and how to write. What decent exercises attempt to do however, is to leverage and empower your creativity to solve a problem. You still have guidelines, but those guidelines are there to push you to adapt, and not to conform.
It didn't simply not teach you anything, it also confined your creativity on top of that - the worst of both worlds.
Can it be any wonder then that many writers today would not give creative writing exercises the time of day? They had been bored senseless by them!
Which is very unfortunate, mainly because these exercises can actually deliver numerous advantages, and provide you with the knowhow to improve your writing skills drastically - when they're done properly.
You see, the way that your high school teacher tried to walk you through those exercises was plainly uninspiring (except perhaps for those of you who had the uncommon fortune of a good teacher). They could very well have been merely waiting for the bell to ring so that they could take another nap in the teachers' lounge.
So, just how should they be done?
Well, for starters, they require direction and purpose. The objective of your high school exercises were to write a story. However I'm sure we can recognize that to create a story, one dosen't actually require an exercise.
The objective of such an exercise then, should be to perform a really specific writing skill in a fashion that challenges that skill and pushes you to improve it.
It's by doing this that you're able to target one of your sticking points, then another, then yet another, and so on and so forth, having the all around outcome of improving the calibre of your writing piece by piece, skill by skill - and not just writing a story for the sake of writing a story.
So now we know the rewards. However, you may be thinking, "great, but that still doesn't seem like a great deal of fun."
But once again, that probably is more about the way that your old highschool teacher presented them back in the day. Creative writing exercises really can be fun and drastically improve your writing at the same time.
A thing many people resented about them was the restrictions placed on their creativity by these types of exercises, when you're told what and how to write. What decent exercises attempt to do however, is to leverage and empower your creativity to solve a problem. You still have guidelines, but those guidelines are there to push you to adapt, and not to conform.
HARI DEEP
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
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