Exercises || The only way to write well is to write.

Most of us ignore the daily influx of spam; we've either trained ourselves to look over our inbox quickly and delete the offensive, the inane, the nonsensical, the pornographic, or the  just plain weird.  Some have taken a more technical approach, applying filters to either their clients or their servers to search for keywords, analyze patterns, check against blacklists and whitelists.  ISPs have begun offering spam protection on their mailboxes, and most corporations deploy some form of protection as well.  With all of these anti-spam measures in place, the spammers have had to become slightly more clever in their unending quest to enlarge our penises and breasts, increase our stamina and decrease our mortgage rates, lower our blood pressure and our prescription drug spending.

Surely, something positive can come from all this.

I'd like to try something a little unorthodox here.

I'd like to try to explain something about writing by talking about drawing. Don't worry -- it isn't a painfully drawn out, clumsily symbolic allegorical exercise or a quaint Zen parable or a cute gimmick for familiar pedantry.

Instead, it's as literal as words on paper.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, at their most expensive. The most common answer to "Where do you get all your ideas?", a question most prolific authors get all the time, is usually along the lines of "everywhere", or for a humorous spin, "how do you ignore all the ideas around you?"

But ideas, while necessary to a story, are not sufficient. Developing the ideas that can be found anywhere into an interesting story, with plot and character and conflict and resolution, is the next step.

This article won't give you a fool-proof method for making an idea seed grow into a good story. It will, however, provide some suggestions on how to work with that initial idea and develop it into something more, using one of a few brainstorming techniques.

This freewriting exercise will hopefully help you with dialogue and how to construct  realistic dialogue and use it to convey emotion. All this using fanciful objects from your pockets.

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Directions:

1. Empty your pockets.
2. Construct dialogue between the objects in your pocket.

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My example inside.

Once upon a time you wrote a piece of poor literature. Too vast a volume to simply discard, you laid it in a drawer or saved it to a dark and hidden folder on your computer's hard drive, only to be revisited in your most wistful and nostalgic moments. But when the need to peek does strike, you are overwhelmed by the sense that your infant masterpiece always deserved better than to be locked away and forgotten.

Music can ease tension and enchant casual listeners, but more importantly, it can even inspire.

This exercise suggests writing words in a sort of free response fashion while listening to various songs. It can be a lot of fun, and maybe even enlightening.

This is an intriguing idea that I admit to swiping from Neil Gaiman's graphic novels of the Sandman.
Have you ever had a moment in which you suddenly realized that you could no longer remember what it felt like to be in love with someone whom you were once enamored? Or what it was like to have sex with a long-time lover? Or the face of someone you used to see every day? I've always felt that was a strange experience, to one moment just know that this is something you can no longer recall, when you always thought it was something you would never forget.
I think it would be an interesting exercise to try capturing all the details of one of those moments on paper. Anybody else game for this?

This is an exercise in imagination. Write something about a stack of paper.

Here in Europe, and especially here in Norway, SMSes are all the rage. Messages are sent from one mobile to another, and since all the kids have a mobile phone (at least most of those over the age of 12) and since there are more mobile phones than people in Norway, everyone seems to know how to SMS, even grandmothers.

Each message must be shorter than 160 characters. This has led to a shortening of certain words. "It", in Norwegian and Swedish "det", is shortened to the letter "d".

Character isn't physical description. It isn't a resume. According to Aristotle, character is action, but an important corrolary to that is, character is desire.