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 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 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 ebook 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 when you need help to write a book. That post is one of my most popular ones and it’s full of advice for beginning writers who have no 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.
30-day writing challenge with my very best writing exercises
Do you love writing exercises AND 30-day challenges? I bet you do!
I know I said becoming a better writer is an ongoing project, but what if you could get better at writing fiction in just one month? My 30-Day Writing Challenge ebook gives you a different creative writing exercise every day and explains what skill you’ll be practising and why. It comes with a printable workbook, but you can also get just the writing exercises PDF without the workbook.
Writing prompts for fun writing exercises
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, it could be your story’s opening line or you could get just a few words that you have to use in your story.
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, so I can quite confidently recommend them to any writer who might be interested in them.
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.
