Writing Exercises and Advice -- Creative Writing Exercises and Advice
Find a wide range of creative writing exercises, as well as advice on all aspects of craft and technique. Creative writing exercises will help get you started writing and improve specific areas of fiction writing.
For May's writing challenge, we turned to John Gardner's classic book on writing, The Art of Fiction . The writing exercise offers the chance to work on description , and to experiment with how description alone can reveal a character's state of mind. Writers may choose from one of three scenarios: Describe a landscape as seen by an old woman whose horrible old husband has just died, describe a …
Don't know what to write about? These exercises and writing prompts will get you started.
No matter what stage you're at with your writing, it's always beneficial to work on craft and technique. These exercises target common problems and weaknesses.
In 2008, we posted a
question from a teen named Makayla and received a wealth of valuable advice in response. Here are some of the top comments.
Each month from September to May, the fiction writing site at About.com supplies a monthly writing challenge and posts reader responses. Read the challenges from past months and submit a response to the most recent writing challenge.
Almost everyone could use a little help in filling a blank page from time to time. Use these story starters, contributed by readers, to launch your writing session. Choose one story starter and see where it takes you. You might be surprised.
These creative writing prompts, appropriate for poetry or fiction, will help you take your free writing sessions in a new direction.
This article started with a question from a reader named Jason, an Iraq War veteran who was now working on his writing, and specifically on description. I knew Jason wasn't alone: evoking a three-dimensional world through words is not easy. Almost all the advice offered in a subsequent …
While you can't catch every mistake yourself, this revision checklist will help you make sure you've checked your work for the obvious pitfalls before sharing it with someone else.
Though writing itself is a solitary pursuit, the writing life presents many opportunities for community. In fact, a writing community can be an essential element in a writing career.
Having trouble selecting a gift for the writer in your life? With a little thought, you can choose a gift that your friend will cherish. This guide will get you started.
We had a hard time deciding whether or not to pick out any of the submissions from this year as being better than others. How to decide among so many creative and well-written entries? So much of any "best of" list is subjective. What appeals to us may not appeal to others. But some entries stuck with us over the year, and some garnered such a response from other readers, that it seemed natural t…
