Three Poetry Prompts for Winter

Poetry prompts and writing exercises are a great way to get a little creative writing done when creativity is elusive. They’re also perfect for challenging yourself as a writer to incorporate new ideas and themes into your work.

You can use these on a day when you’re not feeling especially inspired or as a way to work on something a little different from your usual writing fare. Write a long poem, a short poem, a haiku, or a pantoum. As long as you get the creative writing flowing and have fun with it, you’re doing it right!

These poetry prompts can be used for other types of writing too. Try using them in a short story, a blog post, or a bit of creative prose.

If you decide to tackle these poetry prompts, feel free to post yours in the comments.

Poetry Prompts

Write a poem that contains all of the words in each list, including the title word. That’s it! Pretty simple, right? Read more

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Year-End Review for Writers (Writing Exercise)

The end of the year is a time for reflection. We look back on the past twelve months to see what we accomplished, which goals we met (or didn’t), and what we lost or gained.

For writers, this is a perfect time to examine goals we set for the past year as a way to prepare for setting next year’s goals. This can be a daunting and frustrating exercise, especially if you feel like you’ve come up short in meeting your goals. But if you don’t assess the goals you missed, you won’t be able to figure out why you failed to meet them.

If you’re lucky - if you worked hard and stayed focused on your goals - then this will be a satisfying and gratifying exercise. You’ll gain insight into how you were able to do the things you set out to do.

Whether or not you achieved what you wanted with your writing, by reviewing the past year, you’ll be better equipped to start setting goals for next year that you can realistically achieve.

Take some time in the coming week to evaluate your writing goals for 2008. Most of us probably had a mixture of successes and failures. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Read more

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Holiday Fiction (Writing Exercise)

Looking for creative writing ideas this holiday season? You’re in luck, because I have a wacky one for you.

Before we start, a quick disclaimer: this is a fiction writing exercise in holiday customs rather than the holidays themselves, so this writing exercise is suitable no matter which holiday you celebrate, or even if you don’t celebrate any at all.

Before I reveal the challenge, Read more

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How to Write a Complex Villain (Writing Exercise)

When it comes to writing fiction, we each have our own unique challenges. For some of us, it’s hard to write realistic dialog. For others, it’s a struggle coming up with names for our characters.

Maybe you’re like me, and find it difficult to write a really good villain. I mean - a really bad villain. Or even just a pretty bad nemesis.

The funny thing about our writing weaknesses is that sometimes all we have to do is identify them and suddenly we start coming up with tons of solutions.

That’s what happened to me about two years ago, when I realized that I was having trouble writing a nemesis for my main characters. Time and time again, it was one of the key elements that was missing from the stories I wrote.

Once I noticed this pattern, I started seeing villains all around me - as if merely noticing their absence from my writing made them suddenly appear in my everyday life. A friend would forget to call me back and she’d become a self-absorbed boss who neglected and overworked her employees. My housemate would Read more

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The Biggest Writing Exercise in the World

The time has come. At midnight tonight, tens of thousands of writers will embark on a challenge like no other, a writer’s marathon if ever there was one, each working to complete a 50,000 word novel is just 30 days.

Last year, over one hundred thousand people participated in NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) and this year, the folks at the Office of Letters and Light (that’s Nano’s headquarters) have raised over $160,000 to keep NaNo free and available to writers all around the globe. In fact, for our friends in other parts of the world, like Australia and New Zealand, NaNo is already underway.

If this writing exercise, which is probably the biggest writing exercise in history, appeals to the novelist in you, then head over to nanowrimo.org and sign up. You’ll get access to the forums, NaNo mail, and you’ll be able to forge a support system with writing buddies who are also participating. Visit Procrastination Station whenever your muse goes into hiding.  Subscribe to the official blog, and keep track of your word count using the handy dandy online widget. And please, if you decide to join in the torture fun, then please don’t forget to add me as your writing buddy. You can find my WriMo page by clicking here.

Happy Noveling everyone, and Happy Halloween too!

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