Fiction Writing Exercises – Ideas for Writing Fiction #1

If you’re like me, someone who’s not only a voracious reader, but someone who’s always wanted to write a book, novel, or even screenplay of their own but didn’t know even where to start, then you might like these fiction writing exercises I found on the internet. There were quite a few ideas for writing fiction provided, so I’ve decided to break them up into separate blog entries, letting each stand on its own and hopefully making it easier to try each out thoroughly before attempting the next (better practice that way, I feel, when you focus and learn a writing concept or trick well before going onto others.)

So here goes:

Ideas for Writing Fiction #1

Here is the first kick-starter for your imagination:

1. Dictionary Roulette

Open a dictionary at random and choose the first word that appears. Do this twice more, so that you have three randomly chosen words. Now try to incorporate all three words into a story.

Not only does it help you get over the ‘blank page’ syndrome since now you will have some ideas of what to write about, but it will also help increase your vocabulary, a definite benefit to any budding writer. And the best thing is you can do this over and over as needed until you are comfortable with the technique. (If you don’t happen to have a dictionary, then you can use any book handy to get your creative juices flowing – flip to a page, grab a word, and so on, then write your story, flexing and strengthening your imagination’s muscles at the same time.)

The stories don’t have to be long ones – the trick is to learn how and where to get ideas for writing, especially if you’ve been stuck at the starting point, wondering even where to begin.

This is also a great writing technique for people who’ve been doing it for a while and need a little jump-start when they’ve gone ‘stale’. Plus it has all sorts of opportunities for being pretty funny or very strange given what words could pop up at the top of a dictionary page. Here are a few that came up for me:

tediously, populate, liquefy
shipwreck, hallucination, hamster
generation, monitor, roulette

The possibilities are endless… Why not try them out for yourself?

(These ideas are based on the work of Nick Daws, who is a best-selling author living in Staffordshire, England. His audio book, “Write Any Book in Just 28 Days OR LESS” is available at writequickly.com )