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 mind to ignore that little voice that tells you, "You're not good enough." Or, "Why bother?" Soon you'll be able to trust yourself, discover your own voice, and you'll be a stronger writer as a whole. A ballet dancer practices daily the exercises which defy gravity and natural body structure, but eventually, the basic techniques become second nature. Writing elements and structure will eventually come naturally to you. Writing that blasted memo or research paper will get easier. You'll find surprises each time you write.
You may not immediately find a place to use your writing exercises. It might sound like garbage or only a part of it sounds usable. Sometimes your writing might even be boring. That's a natural part of the writing process. Don't throw it out. Keep a notebook for your writing exercises. Later you might want to return to a passage and develop it further. Maybe months later an idea will come to you. Or you may never use anything from your notebooks. If nothing else, you can look back through your notebooks and track your progress, your increased discipline, your deepening creativity.
Another benefit of writing exercises is discovering your unique voice. We all have our own writing voices, but sometimes we have to uncover it. With practice, it'll be easier to slip into that voice. It'll come naturally.
Natalie Goldberg wrote in Writing Down the Bones, "Think of writing practice as loving arms you come to illogically and incoherently. It's our wild forest where we gather energy before going to prune our garden, write our fine books and novels. It's a continual practice."