119 Best Creative Writing Exercises for Authors in 2025

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?

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.

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

Here is your challenge: for the next week, collect fun names. I've collected them for years in a little notebook - from obituaries, news stories, random lists, and spam. Spam is great for funny names.Then go through your notebook, choose a name, and write a short character sketch based off that name. It's amazing how the names make the characters come to life and start moving the story in fun directions you never expected.

Have each primary character free-write what they think about the other characters in the story. This will also deepen the secondary characters.

A stranger walks into the general store and buys a hammer, a hatchet, some rope, and an apple. What does he do with them?

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."

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

Further chip away at your character and establish how they present themselves to others by imagining how they would briefly describe themselves in the following situations:

1. In a job interview
2. On a first date
3. Catching up with an old friend
4. Flirting with someone at a party
5. In their twitter bio
6. At the border between the US and Mexico

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.