How Creative Writing Exercises Can Make You A Better Writer

Most people’s experience of creative writing exercises were from high school English classes; where their teacher would tell them how to get started and then occasionally follow up with the odd prompt or two. The format of these exercises is often, “Say this, now make else something up, now say this…”
Not only did it not teach you anything, but it stifled your creativity at the same time – the worst of both worlds.
Is it any wonder then that most writers these days don’t wouldn’t give creative writing exercises the time of day? They were bored half to death by them!
And this is very unfortunate, because these exercises can actually offer many benefits, and give you the tools to improve your writing ability dramatically – when they’re performed correctly.
You see, the way your high school teacher tried to walk you through those exercises was just plain uninspiring (except maybe for those of you who had the rare fortune of a good teacher). They might very well have been just waiting for the bell to ring so they could have another nap in the teachers’ lounge.
So how should they be done?
Well, for starters, they need direction and purpose. The purpose of your high school exercises was just to write a story. But I think we can agree that to simply write a story, one does not actually need an exercise.
The purpose of such an exercise then, ought to be to practice a very specific writing skill – in a manner that stresses that skill and forces you to strengthen it.
It is by doing this that you can focus on one of your sticking points, and then another, and then another, and so on and so forth, with the overall effect of increasing the quality of your writing piece by piece, skill by skill – not just aimlessly writing a story for the sake of writing a story.
So now we know the benefits. But you might be thinking, “great, but that still doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.”
But once again, that probably has more to do with the way your old high school teacher taught them back in the day. Creative writing exercises really can be fun and dramatically improve your writing at the same time.
One thing many people disliked about them was the limitations placed on their creativity by such exercises, by being told what and how to write. What decent exercises try to accomplish however, is to leverage and empower your creativity to solve a problem. You still have guidelines, but those guidelines are there to force you to adapt, rather than to conform.