5 Ways That Exercises Give New Life To Your Creative Writing

Has your creative writing has felt dead in the water lately, and you’ve begun to wonder not just WHEN new words will come but IF they’ll ever come again?
Don’t despair, there are plenty of ways to give your writing a new lease of life, and using creative writing exercises is one of the most effective. Here are 5 of the top reasons why:
1. You give your writing specific focus. A lack of focus and direction in a major contributor to being stuck in your writing. With writing exercises, you have a specific channel to create through, a way to focus your writing talents into a powerful laser beam rather than it feel like a single flickering candle about to go out at any moment.
2. You generate dozens of extra writing ideas. Writing exercises are a great way to get your writing started, but you’ll also find that whatever exercises you start with, immediately you’ll trigger off dozens of your own ideas, both for that specific piece of writing as well as in other connected areas. Keep a notebook handy to jot down these offshoot ideas and use them at a later date.
3. You keep your writing fresh and evolving. Most of us get comfortable in a certain writing style, which can mean we get stuck in a rut. If you’re churning out virtually the same poem, story or song time and time again, how creative is that? Using a variety of exercises, you keep your writing fresh by giving it new challenges and new ways to evolve. The more different exercises you use, the wider your creative writing experience and range of techniques grows.
4. You find your natural state of flow more easily. It’s difficult to sit down and instantly get into writing full flow, especially if you’re struggling for ideas. But it’s being in this state of flow when writing is most enjoyable and your best work comes. When you use writing exercises, you find this flow far more quickly as you get straight into writing, instead of sitting worrying about what to write and how to gain momentum when you can’t even write the first word.
5. You unlock the dressing up box. When you only write in one way, it’s like putting on an identical uniform each day you go to work, predictable and safe, but really rather limiting. When you try different writing exercises you give your writing a new freedom, like giving a young child a huge box of dressing up clothes and saying: “Dive in and play, who are you going to dress up as today?”
These are 5 of the reasons that writing exercises can give your creative writing the boost it needs.