The aim of this creative writing exercise is, as the title suggest, to help you hone and perfect the skill of describing things, people, or places, in fiction. As you probably already know it is descriptions that have the ultimate power in transporting the reader into the fictional world that you are creating. But it is often not enough to to just describe everything in great detail and hope it will be enough, because the best descriptions are unique to the type of story you are writing, the character whose point of view you are telling the story from and the type of tone and emotion you are trying to evoke in the reader. But it all starts with the skill of describing and this is what this exercise will try to teach you.

Take your journal and go into your living room. Sit down on the couch and look around the room. Start describing everything you see in the room write full and jointed sentences as though you are writing a story and this is a scene in it. Going from left to right form the position you are sitting describe what you see in full a even flowery detail, but do not embellish, simply record it. You might want to write it all from a point of view of a certain character viewing this room and try to alter to descriptions to fit with their current state of mind and emotion. Do this for every room in the house, then perhaps branch out to a nearby park or a street in your town. If you do this exercise consistently and pretty soon you will have a store of descriptions to draw upon when writing actual stories, which will be fuller and more vivid because of it.

Stay creative!

Other creative writing exercises:

Creative Writing Exercises: Starting a Story
Creative Writing Exercises: The Differences of Style, Tone, Voice and So On
Creative Writing Exercises: Create Your Own Character

Time for a creative writing exercise today, since we really have not had one of these for a long time. Today’s exercise finds it’s way into practically all creative writing textbooks, which only means that it is a great exercise and can really help you write more believable characters. Essentially this writing exercise deals with coming up with a list of, well…characteristics for your characters and relies on the writer answering a set of questions. This exercise is great for fleshing out characters that you have already written, but who lack depth, while it is also perfect for creating new fictional characters from scratch.

To make characters in a work of fiction convincing they need to have a life beyond the page, so to speak, beyond the confines of just the story that you are telling. They need to have a past, good and bad childhood memories, desires, wants, a favorite color, a favorite ice-cream flavor, and so on. In short they need to be “people.” Of course, not all of these details need to find their way onto the page, but it is important for the writer to know them and filling out the questionnaire below will definitely help you better create your own character of choice. For main characters it is especially important that all the aspects of their personality, their past and present, are well known to the writer, because it is only in this way that we are able to create truly multidimensional fictional characters, once that engage the reader immediately and stay with them long after the book is finished.

The instructions:

First take a story that you have already written, but one that needs a to have its characters fleshed out a little more (could be the main character or one of the side characters). Fill out the questionnaire below for each of the characters that need more life. Once you are satisfied that you know all there is to know about the characters, go back to your story and rewrite it, filling in this new information that you have gathered, as needed. Once you are done you should have characters that are much more “alive.” Alternatively, you can do this exercise by just coming up with a completely new characters and answering this set of questions for him or her, before you even begin to write their story. Either way you choose to do this, I guarantee you that the result will be wonderfully fleshed out characters.

The character questionnaire: (feel free to add to it and, of course, just substitute ‘he’ for ‘she’ as needed)

Physical traits

Gender:

Age:

Ethnicity:

Height:

Body type:

Hair color:

Eye color:

Facial characteristics:

Athleticism:

Sociological traits

Birthplace:

Parents:

Family:

Childhood:

Occupation:

Income:

Religion:

Politics:

Personality traits:

Best qualities:

Worst faults:

Favorite foods:

Favorite vacation destinations:

Favorite sports:

Favorite movies/TV shows:

Favorite book:

What makes him happy?

What makes him sad?

What makes him angry?

Who does he love most?

Who does he hate most?

What is he most proud of?

What is he most ashamed of?

What is his secret ambition?

What is his darkest secret?

What is his worst childhood memory?

What is his best childhood memory?

What is his hobby?

Does he have a plan for the future?

Stay creative!

Other creative exercises:

Creative Writing Exercises: Starting a Story

Creative Writing Exercises: The Differences of Style, Tone, Voice and So On

Inspired by (among others):

What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter

Today’s creative writing exercise is aimed at learning how to alter the style, tone, voice sentence structure and all the other elements that go into telling a story so as to be able to tell the story more effectively. There’s different ways to telling every story and some are more effective than others. This exercise helps in determining which way of telling is the best for a given story and will help you learn how to manipulate the fictional elements to achieve the desired effect. It is also good for shelling out the character’s voice, determining which tense is best or which narrative style the story should be told in.

And the exercise is…

Take a simple event: a woman is walking alone through a park. She trips and almost falls, looks around embarrassed, and sees a man smiling at her. Now describe this occurrence in five totally different ways (changes of tone, sentence structure, style, tense, voice, etc.), but make sure you retain the same setting and characters in all the versions. And this exercise will be effective only if the five versions of this scene are completely different from each other.

Adapted from:
The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner

This creative writing exercise calls for writing first sentences of stories, but ones that deal with clear and predefined essences or meanings.  So, write a first sentence about happiness, then write one about sadness.  Write a first sentence about love, then write one about hate.  Write a sentence about pleasure, then turn around and write one about pain.  Make up your own pairs, just make sure you know what feeling you want to convey before you sit down to write.  Do 10 pairs.

This creative writing exercise will help you learn to write in concrete and clear detail, expressing only what you want to express and nothing more or less.  It will help you avoid long-windedness, not getting to the point and boring your reader.

Adapted form:

What If?: Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter

And as always, stay creative!