So I had a few ideas for writing exercizes, and I’m going to share them here. You can share any ideas you guys have, too. Some of these exersizes are real ones I’ve seen on some writing courses / authortube videos.
Pick any one unconventional / background character from a popular story, and write the story as if it were happening from their point-of-view. For example, retell Cinderella from the stepsisters’ perspective. Or the prince’s POV, or the Fairy Godmother’s, and so on.
Write a short story / flash fiction from the POV of an inanimate object.
I have a thread for practicing characterization and description to help with prose where we pick one topic and have two or more characters describe it.
Pick any song with a strong story progression, and convert it into prose form in any format (short story, rhyming prose, novella etc.)
Pick any of your current reads / facourite books, and write any short sinppet from that book in your style. Then compare the original with your version to see what works well and what doesn’t.
#4 in a piecmeal way is a project I’ve been dragging tail on. Cobbled together songs as inspiration.
Isekai everything: pull a character from one setting and place it in another with it’s mentality intact.
Think about stereotypical age limits and plan a classic-cut of an age range you’re not comfortable with.
Learn the damn definition of paradigm and paradigm shift and start applying it as limitations on characters: not YOUR ideology, but THEIRS.
Write something you despise as favorably as possible without being unrealistic.
Actually look at parables. They don’t just have to be biblical, but there’s a ton of them in that text.
For example, there’s a set of them in Proverbs that goes into showing that wisdom sells it’s body (of intelligence) on the same street corners as hookers (very dangerous to do before penicillin).
Using this concept in a realistic way is making sure that your antihero blends in with “the common rabble” more, and is harder to distinguish because you have what is worthwhile being hard to superficially seperate from it’s environment. Distinction comes with intimacy, so you learn who to “place a bet on” as you go. A lot of Antiheros are really just Antipasto, that is, Mary Sues that have had the wheat sucked out of them. They are about as wild as chocolate ice cream vs. vanilla. Learn what a Rocky Road might look like.
Write a character that does everything that pisses you off in a story, and make them hurt, but not die. Actually have the writer come down as God and use a hammer on their head while they wail “I don’t understand!?”
In other words, be rediculous.
For the love of God, find exercises that make sex important to the plot. Hell, do that for everything you add. If it isn’t important, it isn’t usually improvement.
I just opened up a Manga that was soooo promising: and Isekai where the sweet young debutante was supposed to be a reincarnated cussing granny, and other than 1 scene where it was used to establish the fact, if you had removed it, it would have been a rather generic character. No. No. Do better.