5 Simple Exercises to Inspire Your Writing I Learned In College

My Creative Writing course in college was unfortunately at 8 am.

This was not a time of the morning to feel inspired especially since to get to school I had to walk to the train station, take three trains through Boston, and then wait forever for an overcrowded shuttle bus to get from the station to the school - not to mention the long walk through campus to get to the class on the other side of the property.

There was never anytime to stop for coffee most days so my teacher had to do something to keep us feeling creative or at least inspire creativity in us as best as he could.  

Stream of Consciousness Writing 

No matter what the lesson plan for the day was as soon as class started you were to take out a piece of paper, something to write with, and as soon as he hit start on a timer he would raise the projector screen to reveal the writing prompt for the day. 

He didn't give us time to think about it or debate what we were going to write, it was pencils moving from the moment you saw the prompt until the timer announced it was time to stop. 

You weren't allowed to worry about your inner critic or go back and fix any spelling mistakes - of which my papers always had plenty - there was no time to have writer's block when you were set up against a racing clock. You weren't allowed to hand in blank papers, so you had to get going.

Visual Inspiration 

If this professor had known what Pinterest was I'm sure he would have been making mood boards instead of just projecting images from movies. Some of the prompts he would give us would be combined with an image or a still from a movie in which he wanted us to try and capture the mood and tone of the image into words.

Was there heartbreak? An impending sense of doom before battle? Fear? He used this as an exercise to help teach us to capture the emotions movies can give us so easily with just one image in words. 

Random Word Association 

Some days all that would be waiting for us would be a single word with numbers one through five beside it. Our goal was to take this word and write down five others that we thought of when we think of that first one. 

From there we were to use these five words in some way in our story it helped us expand it and give us more of a challenge especially when some days he would put up words like toaster and have us write a story that included that and five words associated with a toaster. 

(I'm sure he received many stories about breakfast that day and I hope it made him hungry as it did to us.) 

Dialogue Prompts

My professor often said that dialogue comes easy to new writers, but building a scene around that dialogue is where they can get lost so some days he would give us all the dialogue we were allowed to use in our stories on the board and we had to build the scene around it. 

From just the dialogue we had to figure out the dynamics between the two characters and in what tone the interaction was going to be.  

Music 

This man loved music almost as much as he did writing, and there was always music playing throughout the classroom. This has stuck with me years later and even now I always play music as I write and I always encourage everyone else to do the same. 

You can build a go-to playlist or like my professor, play whatever type of music evokes the energy you want to have in your story. He was writing some type of space fantasy novel with epic battles so the music in the room was always high energy when we had free-write sessions and he would be working on his own novel alongside us. 

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This professor and I had some differences throughout the semester as he was one of those writers that believed horror fiction was trash and didn't allow it to be turned in for any of the assignments. 

As a writer that started with horror fiction and still enjoys writing it alongside other genres, I was disgruntled having to amend my stories to fit his allowed selection, but other than that the lessons he taught us on inspiring my creativity are still ones I use today. 

I still set a timer when I need to get work done and on the page no matter what it looks like, I'm forever playing music when I write - I may not do much word association, but in a way, I don't need to since I've learned to do it without having to write it down and I once wrote an entire novel based around a bit of dialogue that popped in my head one day and wouldn't go away. 

If you're looking for a way to spark your own creative mind try out some of these exercises and your story might start flying across the page in no time.

Now get to writing, your time starts now. 

With love, 

B. King xo xo

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