119 Best Creative Writing Exercises for Authors in 2025

It is commonly known that a telephone directory might be the most boring text in the entire world. Here is your challenge: write a page of a telephone directory and figure out SOME way to make it interesting.

Our individual perspectives define what we first notice about a person's physical appearance. How do your characters see those around them? Describe one character's physical appearance from the perspectives of three other characters. What does each beholder's description reveal about who they are?

Describe your house - or the dream house you hope to get some day.

Transplant your character into an entirely new location. It could be a new country, city, or continent. How do they react to the new surroundings?

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.

Write a list of images you associate with your theme. Now do the same for each of your main characters. Keep these images in mind as a way to present your theme metaphorically through symbolic motifs.

"Patience is something you admire in the driver behind, but not in one ahead" _ Bill McGlashen. Your protagonist is one or the other. Pick one, and roll with it. Go!

Our subconscious minds combine items in unexpected, sometimes whimsical ways. Set a timer for twenty minutes and use at least three of these words in your draft. Write without stopping: a red scarf, windshield wiper, chrome, doily, blowtorch, spatula, CD-ROM, postage stamp, frittering, static cling, radio silence, kismet, calamity, heartburn, bandage.

Write a scene where your character is speaking to a complete stranger. Immediately after, write a scene where your character is speaking to a loved one. Notice how their behavior changes.

Cheesy pick-up lines are the worst...but sometimes (when they work), they're the best conversation starters out there. Pick one of the pick-up lines from below and write down a conversation that you can imagine following afterward.

• "Your smile is like Expelliarmus. Simple but disarming."
• "Did it hurt? When you fell from heaven?"
• "Are you a parking ticket? You've got fine written all over you."
• "Are you from Tennessee? Because you're the only ten I see."
• "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put U and I together."