by Joseph Robertson

Created on: April 25, 2008   Last Updated: September 04, 2011

The art of the pen is not a lost art, nor is it an esoteric preserve left only to the offbeat or intellectual. It is a vital part of living in a textual world, however much we have come to view our civilization as somehow more audio-visual than in the past. The following are a series of exercises that anyone can use to get the mind working on the job of expressing what's hidden between the folds.

"Numbering Sands", the first item in the list of creative writing exercises, also mirrors something of a basic approach to the personal chronicle represented by the forthcoming book, Numbering Sands, by this author.

Each of these concepts for taking a new approach to the use of the written word is just that, an approach, a temptation, a way of guiding the hand and making the mind say what it knows, or what it suspects. The goal of using any of these approaches is their potential to bring one closer to one's own voice, which is the fundamental requirement of good creative writing.

• Numbering Sands: Ambitious Observation

William Shakespeare writes in Richard II "The task he undertakes is numbering sands and drinking oceans dry..." His meaning is that a given task is near to impossible, too ambitious for the limitations of the human world; it is possible to write some beautiful and glimmering prose or verse by examining ways in which people persist in their attempts to achieve immensely complicated or seemingly unreasonable dreams, on which they depend spiritually or emotionally.

• Water Verse

Jack Kerouac's novel Big Sur ends with a poem that relays the sound of waves crashing against the cliffs, as if they were a kind of speech. Virginia Woolf's The Waves offers a very lyrical prose, which moves in time and portrays time and circumstance in language infused with a liquid kind of energy. Try to capture water, or the meaning or movement of water, in a language that feels elemental, evocative of nature.

• Redacted Inventions

Go back to other pieces you've written and extract phrases that interest you. Try to piece excerpts from various works together into one new piece. Add or remove words where you want; invent based on what was there and how it works as a new whole. If you use lines from another writer: don't pass them off as your own, never plagiarize (you can use another writer's words, but do that exercise only for yourself).

• Essays in Miniature

The best essays contemplate a particular topic, while testing the rational viability

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