6 Ways to Become a More Creative Writer

Creative writing is hard, and with NaNoWriMo just around the corner, it can be even more daunting. So, here are 6 writing exercises I've used as a writer and teacher to help boost my creativity!

00:00 - Intro
00:46 - Indescribable
03:02 - Antonyms Attract
05:49 - The Exquisite Corpse
07:58 - Question & Answer
10:36 - Wren Ad
12:24 - Analogy Profile
14:43 - One Into Another
17:18 - Conclusion, Outro, & Poem

* To Support Me: *

(this video was sponsored by Wren)

[Juliemariak]

I love how so many of these games force the players to not make any sense, and then find the sense in nonsense. I feel like one of the barriers to creative writing is the pressure to make sense, in a conventional way, so I love that these games are about thinking differently (:

[nerdteacher]

Doing improv (which is effectively a lot of this but verbal) really helps me to develop characters and scenarios. A lot of my students in creative writing really liked it because they could often act out something or take a brain break from their work and find something new.

[Borg.Dorg.]

I’m not a long form writer but this antonym game is a solid improv exercise for songwriting.

I just filled my cats water bowl.

You unfairly emptied your dogs rock plate.

I justifiably packed my enemies air basin.

They indefensibly hollowed your friends ground protrusion.

We righteously sealed our foes unfocused depression.

[ghosteye]

I think fan fiction writing is one of the best exercises for a creative writer. I remember a time when writing fan fiction was looked down upon by people who considered themselves "real writers." I found this to be a mistake, as the best stories--in my opinion, anyway--have strong characters. Developed characters. Characters with their distinct personalities, motivations, goals, wants, needs, flaws, strengths. The characters are the lifeblood of the stories and our narrative is born from how they interact with each other, and the world that the writer creates. So for someone who wants to be a creative writer, I think having a good understanding of character development is necessary. But more importantly, a writer must understand archetypes; archetypes are the core to which characters are wrapped around.

Writing fan fiction is a great way to understand characters, archetypes, and how they relate and interact with one another. If you love a text enough to be inspired into writing fan fiction, it means you have a connection to the story and most likely understand the characters and the archetypes relating to one another--even if you don't consciously know it. By writing fan fiction, you gain experience with writing different sorts of interactions with characters you already have an understanding with, exploring new dimensions to the archetypical cores each character has, and create new stories from the exercise. In this way, a writer gains a lot of experience in character interaction and archetypal exploration. I think it's a great way to gain creative writing experience.

[kratM]

One exercise that often helps me brainstorm is something I call "Order and Chaos".
You basically start with an object or concept (e.g. an apple), and then you try to list:
1) things that make it regular (e.g. the mostly spherical shape of the apple)
2) things that make it irregular (e.g. a hole in the apple left by a worm).
And you try to keep the number of items in each list as equal as possible.

[EricChoiniere]

"Restrictions breed creativity" is one of the mantras of Mark Rosewater, the head designer of Magic the Gathering ^^

[cass]

I remember a neat exercise from my high school creative writing class: rewrite a story that already exists, but from a side character's point of view. There are well known instances like this, such as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.

[yuvalne]

by far my favourite creativity exercise is the constructed language of Toki Pona, as a whole. it is a language famous for its simple grammar and its extremely small vocabulary - 137 words, give or take.
that tiny vocabulary means that to use anything other than those words in a sentence, you have to essentially describe what it is using this tiny vocabulary. so for example, I once described "sunscreen" as "ko sinpin pi kama loje ala" - literally "skin paste of not becoming red".
you don't have to learn the language to do this exercise of course, you can just limit yourself to a gross or so words and try to construct coherent thoughts out of it. either way, creativity is guaranteed.

[siriuslyconfused]

I want to throw out that while character profiles can stifle creativity, they CAN be an excellent way to keep track of things as you figure them out and if you use them a little differently. Instead of just tracking things like “John Doe Age 22”, you track decisions John has made or would make, and why. So John’s profile might include his name and age, but it would also include that at the beginning of his journey he chose to take action because of his deep love of Rubic’s cubes and needs to save the factory producing them. With that in mind, every decision John makes will be at least somewhat effected by that first choice and the reason he made it (why does John need to save the cubes?) Tracking major character choices instead of just details like hair and eye color gives you a very different look at who the character is, and one that can help with decisions later. John’s only choice to save his friends is to destroy the Rubic’s factory entirely, but you know John’s initial motivation is saving that factory, so now you look down your decision tree, has John been led to such a point of character growth that he would sacrifice his cubes for his friends? It’s a cool way to figure out if your characters are growing, what choices they might make, and gaining deep understanding of character motivations. Keep in mind that you don’t want to get trapped in the decision tree, it isn’t dictating your character, just charting past actions. So if you need John to decide to destroy the factory for his friends, that’s okay, don’t get trapped in that first motivation, instead work on how you would get from that first motivation to the point where friends would take precedent over cubes. Maybe you need to add some other smaller moments of sacrifice, maybe John was saved by his friends and determined in that moment that he would return he favor, don’t get trapped by the decisions, just use them as a guide.

[agdhani]

when my daughters were young, we used to play a writing game where we built lists of things (colors, objects, nouns, characters, verbs etc) and then we each wrote a short story (a paragraph or more) that included all of those things. I'm on a writing list where we do a similar countdown list of the last 72 hours of the year, one random word per hour, to use in our writing any way we want. I love that sort of random word challenge.

[KyleHarmieson]

A great writing exercise would be to take the result of an Exquisite Corpse, or Sleeping Furiously, - or other variation thereof - and try to write a short story in which the sentence makes complete sense.

[fernglade]

I've never heard of NaNoWriMo, but it sounds amazing. AND it's the month right after inktober?!? Fall is creative season and I'm living for it

[bootstrap_paradox]

Don't know if it counts as a creativity exercise, but I love blackout poetry - it was traditionally done with newspapers or books by blacking out part of the sentence with a sharpie to create a poem. Now I see it done with Wikipedia articles or even tweets and I think it's a fun practice that can create beautiful, out of the box pieces of creative writing. My favourite blackout poem was almost certainly done as a shitpost and I still love it!

[MuteCircle]

We used to play a version of Exquisite Corpse in English lessons at school (not as part of the class, secretly). I feel like the teacher would have respected our creativity if she'd caught us out, even if the fruits of said creativity were pretty much always scatological and puerile.

[physics_hacker]

A lot of people have trouble with names, spcially speculative names (sci-fi/fantasy) when you're not planning on conlanging out the detailed reasons the name is how it is, but one thing I found to be surprisingly good for that is to just get some truly random jumle of letters (not a keysmash, though in a pinch that can work too, just not as well) that is around as long as you're aiming for the name to be, and then ask yourself what the minimum amount of changes would be to this random jumble to make it feel like a name to you. With truly random letters (and maybe a bit of randomness to the length too) this can really stretch your conceptions about names and allow you to create something that feels foreign but still makes some sense, and as you make many names this way, you'll start to see that your brain has patterns in what it likes in names, that is your name style. Evntually if you do this enough you'll be able to just think of new names on the spot that align with that style, and you can always go get more random jumbles to further stretch your conceptions.

[shytendeakatamanoir]

One into Another reminds me of when Robert Cormier described a house as a big birthday cake.
He writes that he wanted to show the class difference between the two characters that are both children, but couldn't find something that really fits until he went from that analogy.
It is immediately evocative, and you can see how a child could have this image of it.

So, those aren't just silly, fun, creative exercises. That can be way more effective than a more realistic approach.

[twojstary]

the antonym exercise is so fun to do, i somehow went from
"i love little girls" yk the oingo boingo song, to "i accept tiny bloke" and it made me lose my shit

[hughcaldwell]

Love all of these suggestions. Another great constraint to force yourself to get creative is lipograms, i.e. deliberately avoiding the use of a certain letter. You can also have fun making up comparative illusions ("More people have been to Russia than I have.") and garden path sentences ("The old man the boat.").

[thanks]

"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations" -Orson Welles

[emilyrln]

I love writing a plot-irrelevant scene between characters to help me get a sense of their thoughts, motivations, and dialogue.