Becoming a better writer is an ongoing project. There’s always more to learn about writing great stories.
If you only ever focus on writing full novels without taking the time to do different writing exercises, you’re missing out on opportunities to practise your writing skills and to improve as an author. Imagine if a runner only ran marathons without practising in between them!
If you’re a beginner writer, at some point you have to go beyond reading writing tips. You have to actually start applying them to your writing.
Different writing exercises and writing prompts are something I’ve focused on a lot here at Protagonist Crafts and this post will tell you where you can find the best ways to practise your writing. Let’s go!
Get my collection of free creative writing exercises
Let’s cut to the chase: this post is full of valuable resources, some of them paid, but I’ve got something cool for you that is free and that’ll save you time.
I included all the writing exercises from my blog in this free Google Doc and I threw in a few exercises from my paid products as well. Get it delivered straight to your inbox and start practising today.
Different writing exercises for adults
If at first you feel like you need to improve your creative thinking skills, you might want to try journaling to become more creative. The post tells you how writing a journal can be a valuable exercise for aspiring authors and it gives you a few journal writing prompts. You could also get my ebook full of creative journaling prompts – you won’t see writing exercises like that anywhere else.
It’s never too soon to start practising which is why I give you writing exercises to give you writing experience. That post is one of my most popular ones and it’s full of advice for beginning writers who don’t yet have any experience in writing fiction. When you’re ready to amp up your writing practice, I have a different post with the best beginner writer exercises that should help you get started.
Do you like a challenge? You can find this free 30-day writing challenge in my blog or you could get a different one-month writing challenge from my Etsy shop. (The paid one comes with explanations of what writing skills you’re practising that day.)
Writing prompts for fun writing exercises
Many of my blog posts have writing prompts that are specific to the post, so you should definitely browse the blog archive and see what you can find. (Some posts are tagged with writing prompts but I’m not 100% confident I’ve remembered to use it faithfully – sorry.)
If you’re not yet familiar with writing prompts, you should know they come in many different forms. There are character prompts that give you a character to write about, there are dialogue prompts that give you one or more lines of dialogue to use in your story and there are writing prompts that give you a premise to write about, just to give you a few examples. A writing prompt could also be a random line that you need to include in your story, or your story’s opening line.
I’ve written about the benefits of using writing prompts before but here’s all that in a nutshell: writing prompts give you inspiration and they can help you write things you might not write without them. Our stories are always inspired by something, so I don’t think it would be right to say that a story inspired by a writing prompt is any less valid than a story inspired by that time you got dumped.
If doing generic writing exercises doesn’t excite you, perhaps you should try writing prompts from different genres. My dark writing prompts and romance writing prompts have been very popular and people have loved using them, and if you’d like fantasy, romantasy or scifi writing prompts, or perhaps spicy writing prompts for your romance novel, you can find all my prompt collections here. You always get 20% off when you purchase at least 3 items!
What kind of writing exercises would you love to use? What do you need more practice with? I’m always creating new posts for this blog and new writing exercises and challenges for Writer Lifestyle, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Protagonist Crafts is a blog about writing fiction, written by a published author and creative writing teacher. You can find more writing tips and inspiration in the blog and you can get the best author tools at Writer Lifestyle on Etsy.
