by Paul Rance

Created on: June 20, 2010

One can never stop improving as a writer, and some simple and enjoyable exercises can certainly help in that regard. Not every exercise will appeal to every writer, and exercises obviously aren't working for you if they become tedious, but here are a few which can stimulate a writer's mind.

You can choose one different exercise to do on any day you plan to write, and these should really be thought of as warm up exercises. However, as a nice bonus, sometimes these exercises may be something you can turn into an article or chapter. All the paragraphs for these exercises should be no longer than 100 words long.

1) Write a very descriptive paragraph about anything you like, and, if you're struggling for inspiration, look out of your window, and write a paragraph about the first thing that catches your eye.

2) Improving one's vocabulary is always going to improve one's writing, especially with regard to using adjectives. It makes writing more interesting when you have a wide range of adjectives to choose from, because if you don't there will be a touch of repetition in all your work. Don't be shy of using a dictionary and thesaurus to enlarge your personal store of words. A good exercise would be to pick an adjective, and think of other words you could use which are similar.

3) Choose an animal, and bring the animal to life in two ways and in two paragraphs. In the first paragraph, describe the animal, its features, characteristics, etc. Then, in the second paragraph, write about the animal as a fictional character. You could do something similar with a historical character as well, giving a true description of the character in the first paragraph, and then write about the character in a fictional way in the second paragraph. In both instances (animal and historical) you could use comedy, fantasy, etc.

4) Think of an old friend you haven't seen for years, and write about them, using their voice, and your imagination, as to how their life has panned out.

5) Write about how you think your day is going to be, and then at the end of the day see how accurate your predictions were!

There are countless writing exercises you can try, but it's really what works best for you, as to which are the exercises you should do regularly. If you need to replace some old exercises with some new ones to freshen things up, then do that, too.

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