119 Best Creative Writing Exercises for Authors in 2025

Establishing how your character is perceived by others is a great way to give them greater context. It can provide the author with expectations to subvert for the reader and add an interesting mystique to the character. To give the Gatsby Method a go, write a scene in which your character is only present through the candid descriptions of him/her by others.

Develop a character that's an author. Write a short story from the point of view of that author.

The most important thing about dialogue in any story is that it must sound real. The next time you go outside, discreetly listen in on any conversation between two people (Person A and Person B) for five minutes. Observe everything about the way that they talk. Then go home and "fill in the blanks," using Person A and Person B's cadences and speech patterns to complete the conversation yourself.

Take your main character and describe the best day he/she has ever had. This is a prompt that will generate questions like, "Why did the character think that was their best day?"

How do you start a story - or get a story back on track? If you're feeling lost or blocked, try templating to get your plot on course.Here's what to do: bullet point your initiating incident, your rising action, your crisis, and your resolution for both your main plot and subplots. Make a table to see events running parallel, remembering subplots exist to enhance, complicate _ ultimately, compliment _ your main action. Listing like this highlights any irrelevancies, keeping your tale on track, and makes all you write intertwined and significant to your protagonist's journey. Plan out using this framework as your reference.

Describe each day of the week as if it were a person. Give each one personality traits, a job, and a goal. Write a short story about them.

In a "Choose Your Adventure" book, you are forced to make a decision at each and every plot point. The decisions you make will take you down diverging paths and dictate your eventual fate. Try this if you're stuck on a plot development detail in your story. Sketch out the two different paths that a character can experience from one plot point, depending on what action he or she chooses to take.

Write a short story of whatever topic you'd like, but make sure that somewhere in there, you include this line: "I can't believe that you stabbed me with a knitting needle."

Getting started is one of the most difficult tasks that faces every writer. Julie Parsons is an international bestselling author. For this exercise, she's giving you the opening lines from some of her books. Take the following lines and use them to write the beginning of your own chapter:

1. You could say it began with a phone call."
2. Michael had watched them both for weeks."
3. She remembered the way it was the first time she saw the prison."
4. Midsummer, no time to be in New Orleans."
5. With the dawn came the light."

What can be more basic than the simple who, what, why, when and where formula? This common sense plan has proved over and over again that it is not only one of the fastest ways to begin a story, but also an easy creative writing exercise to use when you only have a small chunk of time available.If you want this formula to work for you, then the best way to approach it is to answer those questions quickly. Forget about thinking, analyzing, and worrying until later. For now, let's just start writing. Here's an example to show you how easy it is to start.

• WHO? Sally _ an eco activist/policewoman
• WHAT? Having affair with a married politician so she can blackmail and manipulate him.
• WHEN? Now
• WHERE? In contemporary Ireland
• HOW? Recording his every move, generally spying on him in order to destroy him.