Writer’s workshop 1

These warm-up exercises will help you eliminate the enemy: blank paper

There are three groups of exercises here, representing different techniques for getting started. Do some from each group, because the aim at this point is to free your imagination and let it explore unknown paths. Think of these as nothing more than warm-up exercises and don’t judge them as pieces of writing. The more you’re surprised by what you find yourself writing, the better these exercises are working.

Improvisations

Improvisations are a way of tapping into the unconscious mind rather than the controlled conscious level. Improvisations can help you remember forgotten moments of the past and let you think thoughts that might have been censored or ridiculed into silence. Improvisations are likely to be your own ideas and your own natural language rather than secondhand thoughts and language borrowed from other books.

In the course of writing an improvisation, you’re likely to write about what you’re really interested in and what you’re really thinking about. This will help to answer the question: “What should I write about?” To get in the mood, start with a completely unstructured improvisation:

1 Write for 60 seconds without stopping. Just write exactly what comes into your head. Don’t worry about writing in proper sentences with proper punctuation.

Here’s another kind of improvisation, one that gives you a starting point:

2 Write about yourself as you are at this moment, using all five senses. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are you touching? What are you smelling? Are you tasting anything? If something distracts you from writing, write about this distraction.

You can also improvise about the past. See what you start writing about when you do the following exercise:

3 Write the words “I remember” at the top of a piece of paper and then see what comes out. Then write the words “Yesterday, I” at the top of a piece of paper and see what you find yourself writing next.

Improvisation is all about hearing the voice of the unconscious, which we don’t normally hear. One place we do hear it, though, is in our dreams which, for that reason, are often good starting points for writing.

4 Write about a dream you had recently, even if you can only remember scraps of it. Now look at the scraps: do any of them make you think of something else? Is there anything in waking life that they make you think of? What is the mood of the dream? Use the scraps as the starting point for an improvisation.

Some people write down their dreams regularly, often as part of a journal. This is a good idea for writers: a journal can be a grab bag of anything at all that you notice or think.

Your journal is just for you, so you can write it in any way you like and anything at all can go into it. You don’t have to write in it every day, though the more you start doing it, the more intriguing things you’ll start noticing. Once you have a journal, you can use a phrase or an idea from it as the basis for an improvisation, and later on you can ransack it for settings, characters and so on.

There’s a point where improvisation is almost exactly the same as the process of writing fiction. Here’s an exercise where they come very close:

5 Without trying to think of a story, describe a character: male or female, their age, race, occupation, physical appearance and mood at this moment. Where is this character: city, country; inside, outside; alone or with others? Now describe the same things about another character. The second character needn’t have anything to do with the first. Then, connect these two characters. Do they already know each other? If they don’t, is there a way in which they meet each other? Write a page in which these two characters interact.

Use someone else’s story

This is a kind of improvisation, too, but you’re improvising on a tune someone else has already written. You don’t have to worry about plot: that’s already there. You can concentrate on bringing your own voice to the story and focusing on what it is that you find interesting about it. You might worry that if you’re using other people’s work, you’ll never be able to work out your own plots. Don’t worry about that yet.

1 Retell a newspaper story, a myth, a fairy story, a story your mother told you. Ask yourself, why have I chosen this particular story to use rather than another? Is it to do with the events? Or is it the people in it? Is it similar to something I’ve experienced myself? If it’s sad, what exactly makes it sad? If it’s funny, what exactly makes it funny? If it’s sad, what would you have to do to it to make it funny? If it’s funny, what would you have to do to make it tragic? The answers to these questions might suggest another way of telling the story that is further from the original: more your own invention and less the story you’ve borrowed. Retell it again, making use of the answers to the above questions.

Sometimes it’s not the plot of someone else’s story that draws you in, but the actual words the writer’s used or a mood that the original has created. It’s often hard to say just how it has been done but you might be able to borrow a voice you like by doing this:

2 Choose a piece of writing you like. Use the first sentence as the opening for a piece you write yourself; or take the last sentence of the piece of writing and use it to conclude your piece. Or just take a favourite phrase and improvise around it.

There is some magic about the rhythm of sentences, the way the words are put together, that can make a piece of writing very powerful and musical. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t borrow some of that magic.

3 Take a couple of sentences that you like from another story. Now, leaving the structure of each sentence exactly the same, replace the words with words of your own.

This next exercise doesn’t just borrow from someone else’s story but from someone else’s life.

4 Eavesdrop on a conversation and write down what you can remember of it. Use it as the basis for a page of writing. Ask these sorts of questions to get going: what are these characters like? What sort of life histories do they have? Do they like each other, fear each other, despise each other, are they about to fall in love? What are they doing while they talk? Where are they? What are they about to do next?

Word games

No one expects great literature or anything very profound to come out of word games so they’re a good way of writing in an unselfconscious way. In these exercises, the rules of the game force you to put words together and create meanings in ways you may never think of otherwise. Some of these might sound silly. But try them: you might be surprised at what you find yourself writing.

• Write a paragraph without using the letter “e”.
• Write a paragraph in which the first word starts with “a”, the second word starts with “b” and so on through the alphabet.
• Go through the dictionary and collect 10 words that catch your eye. Write a piece that will use them all.
• Take a sentence at least 10 words long, from anywhere. Then use each word in the sentence as the first word of a new sentence.

The results may seem to have no value, but they might inspire a future piece of writing.

The exercises that appear in this ebook are edited extracts from Kate Grenville’s The Writing Book (Allen and Unwin)