by R. M. Ziegler

Created on: September 10, 2008

Why exercise? A ballet dancer doesn't start pirouetting cold. She spends the first part of her session doing barre exercises, warming her muscles before starting to dance. Think of writing exercises as the barre work of writing. When you warm up with a writing exercise, your creative muscles will wake up, become warm and pliable, and soon your writing will gain energy and momentum. You'll ask yourself why it took so long to get started.

Warming up is only one of the many reasons to do writing exercises. Practice is necessary to grow as a writer. Just as dancers must practice the basics of technique, writers must practice the elements of their craft. Judy Reeves says in A Writer's Book of Days, "Writers aren't born knowing the craft; writers are born with an urge to write, a curiosity, an imagination, and perhaps, a love of the language. The way to learn the craft is through practice, and your notebook is the place of your apprenticeship. Even writers who are expert in their craft (those who've practiced long and hard) still try out ideas." Benjamin Franklin read authors he admired and created writing exercises to practice what he had learned. The notebooks of Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Plath were filled with writing exercises. In one notebook Fitzgerald wrote how he and Hemingway "worked out" his plan for Tender is the Night. I'm sure, too, that if you read their notebooks, you'd find boring passages, and even junk, too.

Natalie Goldberg tells her students, "Give yourself permission to write the worst junk in the world." If you tell yourself it's okay to write junk, writing will come easier. If you expect yourself to write a masterpiece at every writing session, your muscles will likely freeze up, your internal censor will take over, and you'll suffer from our dancer's performance anxiety. My sister is a dancer, but she gets performance anxiety. When she expects herself to dance like Gelsey Kirkland, she says she stiffens up. However, when she's alone in her studio, and she's dancing only for herself, not taking herself seriously, letting herself improvise, she does her best dancing.

So don't expect yourself to write any masterpieces. Give yourself permission to write junk. Look at each writing practice exercise as just thatpractice. If you do that, and you don't give yourself any high expectations, I'm sure you'll find all those buried treasures you didn't know you had.

Doing writing exercises will help you take control of your censor. You'll train your

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