Here is the next lesson of Fiction Writing Exercises – Ideas for Writing Fiction #5

5. Proverbs

Write a story based on a proverb or a quotation, e.g.:

• A fool and his money are soon parted.
• The early bird gets the worm.
• Waste not, want not.
• Rome was not built in a day.
• Necessity is the mother of invention.
• If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
• Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
• Cheaters never prosper.
• It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.
• Nice guys finish last.
• When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
• It’s Greek to me.
• There’s a sucker born every minute.

You get the idea… Now try to run with it, adding a twist, such as combining two proverbs or taking a proverb and turning it inside out. Think about the movie LIAR, LIAR – in the main character’s world, “cheaters (aka liars) DO prosper”, have great jobs, women, hot cars, etc. All that changes for our main guy, though, when his son makes a wish that makes dad tell the truth for a day. Suddenly, “honesty is the best policy” ruins most of what the main character THINKS is important in his life, causing disaster after disaster, until he finally realizes what he’s been missing and finds a way to turn it all around, which brings us to “it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”

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

Here is the next lesson of Fiction Writing Exercises – Ideas for Writing Fiction #4

4. Hold the Front Page!

Take a newspaper – local papers and tabloids are often best – and choose a story from it which intrigues you. Imagine the events which led up to the incident described and/or what happened next. You could easily have the basis for a practice story or two or three using the articles as a jumping off point while you fill in the rest of the story or create background material.

Another section to use would be the obituaries where you’re given the name and sometimes a little history of a person. For practice, you could try imagining what a day in the life of one of these people was like and write it down as a story, practicing various writing styles, such as straight fiction or even a go at diary style a la BRIDGET JONES or even the letter style used in LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES.

Just make sure you don’t use actual names and events in a story you intend to publish for real without getting the appropriate permissions – you don’t want to end up liable for libel… These ideas are only suggestions for ways to stretch your ‘imagining’ muscles and to help springboard you on your way to your own original works.

(These fiction writing exercises 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 )

Here is the next installment of the fiction writing exercises – ideas for writing fiction #3.

3. The Untidy Professor

Think of a character with a particularly strong character trait, e.g. absent-minded, lazy, domineering. Place your character in circumstances which conflict with this trait. Immediately you have two of the essential ingredients for fiction: characters and conflict. To create a story, all you need to do is build the conflict to a crisis, and show what change results.

Strong character traits also help drive plot and narrative as they help create 3-dimensional people who have distinct wants and needs, desires and dislikes, characters that readers will care about and want to read about, characters that can ‘walk off the pages’. Without enough defining traits, characters become interchangeable and don’t inspire people to want to know more, to keep them reading.

However, beware of adding characteristics just for the sake of adding traits. You want memorable, not laughable or unbelievable. (Unless of course, you’re intentionally creating a parody or comedy…)

(These fiction writing exercises 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 )

As promised, here is the next entry of Fiction Writing Exercises – Ideas for Writing Fiction #2

2. Take it From Here

Read the first paragraph of a story you have never read before in an anthology or magazine (if the opening paragraphs are very short, read the second and third paragraph as well). Now put the story to one side and write the rest of the story. The chances are that you will end up with a completely different story from the original. All you need to do then is change the opening paragraph(s) in your story to have a completely new tale of your own.

A twist to that for extra practice and some increasing difficulty would be to read the ending of a story (preferably one you’ve already read before so you don’t ruin the ending for yourself!) and then write how the story begins and its new middle. Then change the ending and again you have a new story.

Since you’ll know where you need to go (or where you started) working back (or forth) will help you develop your skills in plotting as you work out the rest of each story and finding ways to achieve your ends (or beginnings!).

(These fiction writing exercises 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 )

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 )