by Elton Gahr

Created on: May 20, 2009

Every writer has been given the advice that the only way to get better is to practice. This advice is as good as it is blindingly obvious, often we don't think about how we practice even once we know we have to. Writing is of course valuable but simply putting down words never stretches your ability and without stretching you won't improve as quickly as you would like, so what are some exercises that can help you to improve faster, and to increase the breadth and width of your writing talent.

The first thing to do is put away the novel. Novels are fantastic fun, but they are horrible places for practice. They simply take too much effort and a good but needs to have a consistent style and tone or it will be difficult to read. This leaves the choice of short stories or a journal.

Either of these are a useful place for writing practice, but typically you will want to stick to the one that most closely resembles the type of writing you want to do. This roughly equates to short stories for the fiction writer and a journal for the nonfiction, but not entirely.

The key to making this practice important is first to locate your comfort zone. You have a natural style of writing. For the typical writer this is third person narrative, in a specific genre, often with a specific style of character. You may have different ruts but the odds are high you have ruts.

These are important because the value of daily writing practice is that it either reinforces these ruts or helps you to break out of them. There are of course good habits in writing that you will want to enforce. Daily practice will help you to create better grammar and spelling as well as other good habits but it's the ruts that sadly most define your writing.

The first day you don't want to push yourself too much. Attempting to obliterate completely ruts in a single day is an act of futility and will be frustrating. Instead, try writing a story from a different point of view. First person narration can be good if you have rarely, or never, tried using it, but for something truly different try writing a short story in second person narration. It is quite fun, and with your main character being referred to as "you" you're forced to alter your style considerably.

The key to daily writing practice is more than to simply write every day. This is of course the first step, but just as in any sort of sports practice, the true value is in focusing in on the skills that you need to improve. Write stories in genres you don't normally care for, write from a gender or age perspective you don't usually use, test your use of metaphor or create a satire. Simply stretch yourself every day. Then, when you return to your more normal writing, you may begin to find places where these new techniques make stories possible that you could never have told before.

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