Meredith Sue Willis writing exercises

Meredith Sue Willis
Author and Teacher

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Today is
(Updated 5-10-08)

Current Exercise

My Featured Book

More Places for Writing exercises

Writing exercises for kids, click here.

For teens, begin here.

Writing hints

Dear Visitor,
    I am a veteran teacher of writing from little kids to university level, and I offer these writing exercises free in the spirit of the Internet as a place for a new kind of community among people. I call these "exercises" rather than "prompts" or "lessons" because I think of them as ways to strengthen the writing muscles that you already have and to expand your range of techniques. The execises are free, but if you want to give something back, please consider reading some of my online fiction or my books. I also teach private classes online as well as public classes at New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies.
     Finally, I have a free newsletter you can get by sending an e-mail to:  Readerbooks-subscribe@topica.com . Or, read it at Books for Readers. I appreciate feedback-- which exercises were useful to you? Do have suggestions for me to share with others on this site?

                                   -- Meredith Sue Willis

Current Exercise

Guy de Maupassant above wrote old-fashioned plotted stories toward the end of the nineteenth century. First, read this translation of one of his well known stories, "The Necklace," online. Then write a very short story with a surpise or turn at the end.

Writing Hints

Grace Paley once said in an interview, "I'm an ear believer--I think the ear is smarter than the eye. The experience of reading your work aloud in a class carries you back to that original impulse, 'I want to tell you something.' 'What did you want to tell me? Tell me.' When you tell a story, it's your voice telling a story. You really can hear what's wrong with it. People think you can just sort of smear over it, but that's not true. What I'm trying to do is to remind students they have two ears. One is the ear that listens to their own ordinary life, their family and the street they live on, and the other is the tradition of English literature."
Words to avoid. There are certain words and phrases, all perfectly good English, that I avoid in my writing. I find that I have in the past overused them, probably because I actually like them. One word I have sworn off is “shard.” "Shard" sounds like what it is, a broken piece of something, but I’ve come to over-use it. It seemed like every time a glass broke or sun was refracted through a window in my prose, I would call it “shards of glass” or, metaphorically, “shards of light.” I also avoid “smirk” except in really particular circumstances, preferring the more neutral “grin” or “sneer.”“Smirk” has an almost comic book quality for me, so I have to really careful of it. I also avoid certain phrases I used to love as a beginning writer: "visibly shaken" was one I used to look for excuses to use, as in "When she heard him say her name, she was visibly shaken." When I was a child, I adored "gathered up her skirts!" That's got to be what Cinderella did when she fled the Ball, and I was always looking for excuses to have someone gather up her skirts and run away. Do you have such words and phrases on your personal Avoid list?

Try not to do just one thing if you can do more than one. Don't give the information that he ate a steak, rather, show both that he ate a steak and that he was angry when he was eating it: "He stabbed his fork into the slab of sirloin and and slashed off a piece with his knife."
Separate your critical brain from your drafting brain. Try writing at least three paragraphs (or even better, three pages) before you go back and fiddle with the words. If possible, don't read over what you wrote today until tomorrow or at least after lunch. It will be much easier to make changes.
After you've written your draft, go through it looking to see if all the essential conflicts have been dramatized. This is an especially good technique if you feel that your dialogue is flat or boring. Put the dramatized conflicts into the dialogue.
Put thinking, contemplation, and dramatized flashback scenes at a point in your story where it would be natural in real life too: riding a train, lying awake at night when the character can’t sleep, etc.
Click here for more hints from writers, editors, and agents.

More Free Writing Exercises below and here :

Exercises 1- 20

Exercises 21- 40

Exercses 41 - 60

Exercises 61-80

Exercises 81-100

Exercises 101 - 120

Here's something new that looks like fun: Snapfiction.com offers a writing exercise "challenge" every week--give it a try!
Looking for Poetry Writing Exercises? Writenet at Teachers & Writers has some good ones originally planned for young people, but they would make great starters for anyone
For writing exercises for children, click here. Teens can use the ones on this page, or look at my page for teens.
Here's a link to a really interesting haiku exercise from Timothy Russell.
And then there is making fun of writing prompts:McSweeney's has a fairly funny take-off called "Thirteen Writing Prompts" by Dan Wienceck
Rita Marie Keller has a blog called Buried Treasures that is full of writing prompts and links to more writing prompts. " Essays and writing exercises to help you uncover the great writing ideas you already have."

Exercise # 121

Sometimes it's fun to experiment with writing exercises usually reserved for elementary age children. Try this: Write an introduction to yourself that includes the following things that move roughly from outside, to inside, to deeper inside-- to explosion!

Write about what people see when they look at you from the outside
Write what people commonly know about you-- your job, some of your accomplishments or interests, who you live with, where you live, etc.
Write something that very few people know about you: wishes, dreams, a secret.
Finally, write a lie: how sometimes when you are home alone, you are transformed into.....

Exercise # 122

For Valentine's Day, write about a person selecting a gift for a loved one-- this could be yourself or a character, and the gift could be appropriate, wildly inappropriate, welcomed or rejected. Candy and flowers are old standard choices...

Exercise # 123

The man is crossing the railroad tracks on a damp summer day. He thinks to himself....

(For information on the photo, click here.)

Exercise # 123

It is a presidential election year. When I was growing up, I was taught never to discuss politics with friends-- a piece of advice I've rarely followed.... Write a dialogue in which two (or more) people discuss a political issue or candidate. Have the people disagree. Does the conversation become heated? Or does one person back-pedal or suppress her or his real beliefs? If you are writing fiction, try this with at least one character who you haven' t thought of as political at all. Is the character registered in a party? Does the character always vote? Ever vote?

Exercise # 124

Take this extremely short and dull bit of dialogue. Rewrite it, adding more. First, write it as a conversation between a teenage boy and an elderly woman. What you add may include longer speeches, more speeches, a setting, descriptions of the people, how they say things, their gestures, and anything else you want to add. Now write it again, as if spoken by two people in love, of any age. Then try it again as... ???

Here is the bare-bones dialogue:

Hi.

Hi.

Where were you?

Nowhere.

Exercise # 125

Imagine the face of a stranger. This could be a person you see on the bus or someone in a restaurant or anywhere else. Start with a real face, but change anything you want. Visualize the face first, then where the person is, and the specific situation. Imagine that the person begins to speak to you, telling you how they came to be here. Now in your imagination, move closer to the person so you hear them speaking into your ear and telling you more personal things: what they are worried about, who they love. Finally, slip into the person's mind so that you are hearing thoughts and dreams and fears. Write as much of this as you can, not worrying about order or chronology. Just try to capture the voice.

Exercise # 126

You (if you are writing memoir) or a character (f you're writing fiction) leave home for an important event: a job interview, a funeral. Something entirely unexpected and perhaps even random happens: on the way to a funeral you stopped by a roving t.v. reporter and asked your opinion on the new smoking laws. Or there is a freak hailstorm-- at any rate, something for which the person is totally unprepared. Describe the incident, but also write about the effect on plans, feelings, ability to proceed with the set task, etc..

Exercise # 127

"I looked down the aisle of bookshelves and at the very end I saw..."

For great photos of West Virginia mining towns, steel mills, and much more at Kevin Scanlon's site, click here.

Featured Book

If you order this month's featured book by direct mail, you may take 10% off your total order, excluding shipping & handling and tax. Order from the Order-by-Mail page.

Trespassers

A novel set during the student strikes and
sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968...

"With the same attention to detail she brought to her character's small town childhood, Willis brings the people, ambiance and events of the urban experience out of the past and into a fresh light 30 years later. The silky locution that springs from the Appalachian heritage of storytelling is fully empowered here. Critics agree: Others have written of the same era, but few write as well."
-- Claudia Ebeling in Bucknell World

Trespassers, the final volume in Meredith Sue Willis's luminous Blair Morgan trilogy, brings its West Virginia-born heroine to the brink of adulthood and to the epicenter of her generations' rage. it is 1967, and 20-something Blair is off to New York City to begin life on her own....The novel is different in tone than the earlier books of the trilogy, in which it was possible to detect the cadence of West Virginia (right down to Blair being called Blair Ellen by those who knew her then). This book is blunter, with more dialogue. There's no mistaking New York.

-- Carol Herman in The Washington Times

Willis demolishes dreaded Appalachian female stereotypes....Blair Ellen is a particular girl, to be sure, from a particular region of the country, which itself represents the reforming spirit of the turbulent ‛60's, but her aspirations and experiences in social action speak to a collective, inclusive identity which makes her a representative of her generation, not her region.

— Gina Herring, Appalachian Journal, Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 1998.

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New Book for Kids Billie of Fish House Lane From Montemayor Press Read a chapter: Click on Catalogue, Literature for Children

A literary Map of West Virginia!

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Photos and Art Some great graphics? http://ann-s-thesia.com/

Visual Artists's Websites Charlie Cowger Ann Olson Rochelle Ratner Duane Smith Ella Yang

Brooklyn by Ella Yang

Music& Mixed Media Websites Peter Sciaino Deep Listening

Blogs The Compulsive Reader National Book Critics Circle Claudia Carlson Sherry Chandler Fred First Cat Pleska Valerie Nieman Dee Rimbaud Larissa Shmailo Christopher Vera David Weinberger Lisa WIlliams Loho (Group Blog about the Lower East Side) Brooklyn Parrots Blog!

More Links

Meredith Sue Willis Author and Teacher

More Places for Writing exercises

Writing exercises for kids, click here.

For teens, begin here.

Writing hints

-- Meredith Sue Willis

Current Exercise

Guy de Maupassant above wrote old-fashioned plotted stories toward the end of the nineteenth century. First, read this translation of one of his well known stories, "The Necklace," online. Then write a very short story with a surpise or turn at the end.

Writing Hints

Try not to do just one thing if you can do more than one. Don't give the information that he ate a steak, rather, show both that he ate a steak and that he was angry when he was eating it: "He stabbed his fork into the slab of sirloin and and slashed off a piece with his knife."

Separate your critical brain from your drafting brain. Try writing at least three paragraphs (or even better, three pages) before you go back and fiddle with the words. If possible, don't read over what you wrote today until tomorrow or at least after lunch. It will be much easier to make changes.

After you've written your draft, go through it looking to see if all the essential conflicts have been dramatized. This is an especially good technique if you feel that your dialogue is flat or boring. Put the dramatized conflicts into the dialogue.

Put thinking, contemplation, and dramatized flashback scenes at a point in your story where it would be natural in real life too: riding a train, lying awake at night when the character can’t sleep, etc.

Click here for more hints from writers, editors, and agents.

More Free Writing Exercises below and here :

Exercises 1- 20

Exercises 21- 40

Exercses 41 - 60

Exercises 61-80

Exercises 81-100

Exercises 101 - 120

Here's something new that looks like fun: Snapfiction.com offers a writing exercise "challenge" every week--give it a try!

Looking for Poetry Writing Exercises? Writenet at Teachers & Writers has some good ones originally planned for young people, but they would make great starters for anyone

For writing exercises for children, click here. Teens can use the ones on this page, or look at my page for teens.

Here's a link to a really interesting haiku exercise from Timothy Russell.

And then there is making fun of writing prompts:McSweeney's has a fairly funny take-off called "Thirteen Writing Prompts" by Dan Wienceck

Rita Marie Keller has a blog called Buried Treasures that is full of writing prompts and links to more writing prompts. " Essays and writing exercises to help you uncover the great writing ideas you already have."

Exercise # 121

Sometimes it's fun to experiment with writing exercises usually reserved for elementary age children. Try this: Write an introduction to yourself that includes the following things that move roughly from outside, to inside, to deeper inside-- to explosion!

Write about what people see when they look at you from the outside

Write what people commonly know about you-- your job, some of your accomplishments or interests, who you live with, where you live, etc.

Write something that very few people know about you: wishes, dreams, a secret.

Finally, write a lie: how sometimes when you are home alone, you are transformed into.....

For Valentine's Day, write about a person selecting a gift for a loved one-- this could be yourself or a character, and the gift could be appropriate, wildly inappropriate, welcomed or rejected. Candy and flowers are old standard choices...

(For information on the photo, click here.)

Exercise # 123

Exercise # 124

Hi.

Hi.

Where were you?

Nowhere.

Exercise # 126

For great photos of West Virginia mining towns, steel mills, and much more at Kevin Scanlon's site, click here.

Featured Book

If you order this month's featured book by direct mail, you may take 10% off your total order, excluding shipping & handling and tax. Order from the Order-by-Mail page.

Trespassers

A novel set during the student strikes and sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968...

Subscribe to Meredith Sue Willis's Free Newsletter for Readers and Writers:

Subscribe! Enter your email to join ReaderBooks today!

New Book for Kids
Billie of Fish House Lane
From Montemayor Press
Read a chapter:
Click on Catalogue,
Literature for Children

A literary Map of
West Virginia!

Writers' Links
& Resources
Resources for writers
Poetry Daily
Writers Almanac
How Artists Get Paid
Int. Women's Writing Guild
New Publishing Paradigm
Resources for writers
Thunderburst
Edwards Bros. Printers

Writing by MSW
Online Fiction
Online Nonfiction
Article on Revision
Article on Dialogue
Getting Published
Reviews
Books
Adult Fiction
Books for Children
Books on Writing
Free Newsletter
for Readers

FamilyOriented Websites
Ellen Kahaner's Mural class
Reading and Traveling with Kids

More
Jeremy Osner

Photos and Art
Some great graphics?
http://ann-s-thesia.com/

Visual Artists's Websites
Charlie Cowger
Ann Olson
Rochelle Ratner
Duane Smith
Ella Yang

Music& Mixed Media Websites
Peter Sciaino
Deep Listening

Blogs
The Compulsive Reader
National Book Critics Circle Claudia Carlson
Sherry Chandler
Fred First
Cat Pleska
Valerie Nieman
Dee Rimbaud
Larissa Shmailo
Christopher Vera
David Weinberger
Lisa WIlliams
Loho (Group Blog about the Lower East Side)
Brooklyn Parrots Blog!

Meredith Sue Willis
Author and Teacher

A novel set during the student strikes and
sit-ins at Columbia University in 1968...

Subscribe to Meredith Sue Willis's Free Newsletter
for Readers and Writers:

Subscribe!

Enter your email to join ReaderBooks today!