Writing exercises: 60 creative writing drills, sorted by skill

Writing exercises are short, timed drills that train one skill at a time, the way scales train a pianist. The 60 below are sorted by skill: description, dialogue, character, point of view, structure, revision, voice and poetry. Each has instructions and a time limit of ten to thirty minutes, and most work on any draft, including the one you're stuck in.

A prompt gives you something to write about. An exercise gives you a rule and a skill to work on, and it's often best done on material you already have. Keep the two jobs apart: when you need a subject, take one from the creative writing prompts and draft it first. An exercise is easier to judge when the only new thing on the page is the skill.

Description and detail exercises

Description is choosing. These drills train you to pick the detail that does the most work, and to reach past sight to the other senses.

1. Three details (10 min). Describe a room you know well in exactly three details, chosen so a stranger could guess who lives there. No judging adjectives: no cozy, beautiful or messy. Then swap one detail for another and see who moves in.
2. Lights off (15 min). Describe a busy place, such as a kitchen at dinnertime or a bus station at rush hour, twice: first using only what you can see, then with no sight at all. Combine the best line from each into one paragraph. The guide to sensory language covers each sense in turn.
3. Mood transfer (20 min). Describe the same street twice: through a character who has just lost her job, then through one who has just been offered the job she wanted. Don't mention either event. The street stays put. The details she notices change.
4. Zoom (15 min). Write five sentences that move steadily closer: a town from the hill above it, one street, one house, one room, one object on a table. Each sentence should make the reader want the next, closer one.
5. The exact noun (15 min). Write a paragraph about a garden, a garage or a hospital ward in which every noun is as specific as you can make it: not a tree but a split cherry, not a car but a '98 Corolla with one blue door. Then cut half the adjectives and see how well the nouns hold up alone.
6. Clothes in motion (15 min). Write three moments, a sentence or two each, that describe a character's clothes only as they move: a coat caught in a car door, a sleeve pushed up for a blood test, a shoe kicked off under a desk. No inventory of garments. For more, see describing clothing in writing.
7. Weather with a job (10 min). Write a paragraph of weather that changes what a character does or feels in their body: wind that takes a door out of her hand, a steering wheel too hot to hold. If you can delete the weather without losing anything, it was decoration.
8. What the guidebook leaves out (20 min). Sit in a real public place for ten minutes and list ten things no guidebook would mention. Then write one paragraph using only the three strangest.

Dialogue and subtext exercises

Dialogue is speech with the dull parts removed. These drills train your ear for how people dodge, talk past each other and give themselves away. For punctuation and tags, see how to write dialogue.

9. Transcribe, then cut (20 min). Transcribe two minutes of a radio or podcast interview word for word, with every “um” and false start. Then rewrite it as fiction dialogue at a third of the length, keeping each speaker's verbal habits. The gap between the two versions is what written dialogue is.
10. No tags (15 min). Write a one-page scene for three characters with no dialogue tags and no action beats. A reader must be able to tell who's speaking from the words alone. Then add back only the tags the reader needs, and count them.
11. The dodge (15 min). One character asks the same question five different ways, and the other answers something slightly different each time. Hold back the real answer until the last line, or leave it out entirely.
12. Status swap (20 min). Two characters, one with the power at the start: a landlord and a tenant, a surgeon and a patient. Through dialogue alone, the power changes hands by the end of the page.
13. Same news, three mouths (15 min). Give one piece of news, “The last train's been canceled,” to three characters: a teenager, a retired colonel and a night nurse at the end of a twelve-hour shift. Each says it in at least two lines of their own.
14. Dialect without respelling (15 min). Write half a page of one character's regional or class speech with word choice, grammar and rhythm only, and no phonetic spelling. The first sentence of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) shows how far grammar alone goes: “You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.”
15. Interrupted (15 min). Write a one-page argument in which one character never gets to finish a sentence. Mark each cutoff with an em dash (the em dash and en dash guide has the rules), and make every interruption reveal something about the person interrupting.
16. Cut the hellos (10 min). Take a dialogue scene from your draft. Delete every line before the first one with friction in it, and every line after the last one that changes something. Count what you cut.

Character and motive exercises

Characters come alive through choices, habits and contradictions. These drills look for all three in a character you already have, one from your draft, rather than inventing a new one. To invent one, start with the character development questions, and log what you find in the character profile template.

17. A week of receipts (15 min). Write out a character's bank statement for one week, every transaction with a time and an amount. Then write the scene behind the strangest line on it.
18. The interview (20 min). Interview your character for twenty minutes, in their voice. You ask, they answer, and you stop the first time they refuse a question. The refusal is usually the most useful answer you'll get.
19. Both at once (15 min). Pick a trait and its opposite, such as generous and stingy, or brave and timid. Write a one-page scene in which your character shows both, and make it believable that they're the same person. The character traits list has hundreds to pair.
20. Seen by an enemy (15 min). Describe your protagonist in one paragraph by someone who dislikes them but is trying to be fair. Then in one paragraph by someone who loves them. Underline what both of them noticed.
21. Sixty seconds (20 min). Put a character in front of a choice between two things they want. Write only the minute before they choose, with no backstory. What they notice in that minute should tell the reader which way they'll go.
22. One habit, three days (15 min). Give a character one small habit, such as folding receipts into tiny squares. Show it on an ordinary morning, during an argument and at a funeral. The habit stays the same, and its meaning changes.
23. Want and won't (15 min). Write a scene of about 300 words in which your character wants something badly and turns down an easy way to get it. The reader should understand the refusal before the character explains it, if they ever do.
24. First page, last page (20 min). Write your character doing the same ordinary task, making coffee or locking up the shop, at the start of the story and at the end. Only the way they do it may change. If nothing has changed, decide whether that's the point. The guide to character arcs covers both kinds.

Point of view exercises

Point of view decides what the reader is allowed to know. These drills move the camera and test how close it sits. The guide to point of view explains each option.

25. Three seats at one table (20 min). Write one dinner-table moment three times, about 150 words each: through the host, a guest who arrived late and a child under the table. Keep the events the same and let each viewpoint notice different ones.
26. First to close third (15 min). Take 200 words of first person and rewrite them in close third, keeping every thought. Note what you gained and what you had to give up. Then try the reverse on a different passage.
27. Filter hunt (10 min). On one page of your draft, circle every saw, heard, felt, noticed, realized and wondered. Rewrite each sentence without the filter words, so the reader gets the thing itself instead of the noticing.
28. The wrong witness (20 min). Write a page in which a narrator describes an event and the reader can see they've got it wrong. Plant two clues the narrator misreads. That's the basic machinery of an unreliable narrator.
29. Camera only (15 min). Write a one-page tense scene in objective point of view: only what a camera and a microphone could record. No thoughts, no feelings named. The reader should still know what each person feels.
30. Five rungs (15 min). Write five sentences about one character that start at a historian's distance and end inside her head, in her own words. Then write a scene that moves up and down that ladder on purpose.
31. You, specifically (15 min). Write one page in second person addressed to a particular person: a sister, an ex, a former teacher. Decide who “you” is before you start, and give them habits only that person would have.

Structure and plot exercises

Structure is what happens, in what order and how fast. These drills work at the size of a scene and a short story, where you can see the whole shape at once.

32. A story in six sentences (15 min). Write a complete story in six sentences: a situation, a want, an obstacle, an attempt, a crisis and a change. Then expand the crisis sentence into a full scene.
33. Reverse outline (20 min). Take a chapter, yours or a published one, and write one line per scene saying what changes in it. Put a question mark next to any scene where nothing changes. Those are the ones to cut, merge or rethink. The scene outline template has a field for exactly this.
34. Start later (10 min). Take any scene you've written and delete its first third. Read what's left. Many scenes survive the cut, and some improve, because the deleted part was you warming up. Starting in medias res is the same move made on purpose.
35. Two orders (20 min). Tell a short event, such as a near miss on a highway or a marriage proposal, in chronological order. Then tell it from the end, circling back. Note which version makes the reader lean in, and why. The guide to suspense in writing explains the difference.
36. Three times worse (20 min). Give a character a simple goal, such as getting to the airport by six. Write a scene of 500 words or less in which it gets harder three times, each problem worse than the last and each caused partly by how they handled the one before. Stop at the third problem.
37. Scene or summary (15 min). Write the same week of a character's life twice: once as a 100-word summary, once as a full scene covering one hour of it. Then decide which parts of a book deserve which treatment. More in the guide to pacing.
38. Plant and pay off (20 min). Write a 500-word story in which an object mentioned in passing in the first paragraph decides the ending. That's Chekhov's gun in miniature. Make the payoff feel inevitable rather than convenient.
39. Ending first (15 min). Write the last line of a story before anything else. Then write a 300-word story that earns it.

Revision and editing exercises

Revision is a skill you can practice on purpose, not only when a deadline forces it. Use your own pages for these: the point is to learn what you, specifically, tend to get wrong.

40. Cut thirty percent (20 min). Take 500 words of your draft and cut them to 350 without losing a single event. Then look at what went. It's often throat-clearing, repetition and stage directions.
41. Read it aloud (15 min). Read a page aloud at the speed you'd read to an audience. Mark every place you stumble, run out of breath or get bored. Fix only those.
42. Verb upgrade (15 min). Underline every was, had, got, went and made on a page. Replace half of them with a precise verb, or restructure the sentence so the verb does the work. The strong verbs list has hundreds to choose from.
43. Adverb audit (10 min). Circle every adverb ending in -ly. Delete them all, then restore only the ones whose sentence falls apart without them. The adverbs list shows which kinds tend to earn their place.
44. Margin notes (10 min). Beside each sentence of a paragraph, write in three words what it does. Wherever two sentences have the same note, merge them or cut one.
45. Find your tics (15 min). Search a chapter for the words you lean on, such as just, really, a little, turned, smiled and nodded. Count each one, then cut or vary them until none shows up more than a couple of times a page. The filler words list has the usual suspects.
46. The stranger's read (20 min, after a week away). Put a scene away for at least a week. Then read it printed, or in a different font, as if a stranger wrote it, and write down three questions a reader would ask. Answer them in the text, not in your head.
47. One page, three passes (30 min). Revise the same page three times, each time for one thing only: first clarity, then rhythm, then the one detail you want the reader to remember. Separate passes make it less likely that you fix one thing and break another.

For exercise 45, you can select a chapter in Strokes and ask the Strokes Assistant which words and gestures you repeat most. It answers in a panel beside the draft, so you have the count before you start cutting.

Voice and style exercises

Voice is the sum of choices you make without noticing. These drills make the choices visible, mostly by imitation, which is how many writers taught themselves.

48. Franklin's method (30 min, then 30 more a few days later). Pick a paragraph by a writer whose prose you admire. Write a short note on what each sentence says, put the original away for a few days, then rewrite the paragraph from your notes alone. Compare the two sentence by sentence and mark every place theirs is better.
49. Sedulous ape (20 min). Type out a paragraph by a writer you admire. Then write a paragraph on a different subject in the same sentence shapes: the same kinds of clauses in the same order, the same punctuation. Read the two aloud, one after the other. Exercise 51 isolates sentence length.
50. Ten styles (20 min). Write three plain sentences about a small incident, such as a man running for a bus and missing it. Then retell it ten ways: as a weather forecast, a legal statement, a text to a friend, a fairy tale, a sports commentary, a recipe, a diary entry, a complaint letter, a scientific abstract and a eulogy. Raymond Queneau did it 99 times with one incident on a Paris bus in Exercises in Style (1947).
51. Sentence-length map (15 min). Count the words in each sentence of a paragraph you admire and write the numbers down: 4, 22, 7, 31. Write a paragraph on your own subject that matches the pattern exactly. Then read both aloud.
52. The narrator's word list (15 min). Make two lists for your narrator: twenty words they'd use and twenty they never would. Write a paragraph using at least eight words from the first list and none from the second.
53. Register shift (15 min). Rewrite a paragraph of formal prose, such as a lease, a policy or an academic abstract, for a twelve-year-old. Then rewrite a casual paragraph, such as a group text, in formal English. Notice which words had to change and which survived. The guide to writing styles names the registers.
54. Opinion without commentary (15 min). Write a neutral paragraph describing a room full of people. Then rewrite it with a narrator who has an opinion about everyone in it, without adding a single sentence of commentary. Only the word choices may change. See narrative voice for why this works.

Exercise 48 is Benjamin Franklin's. In his Autobiography (begun 1771), he describes finding an odd volume of the Spectator as a young apprentice and deciding to imitate it:

He went further, turning some of the tales into verse and, once he had forgotten the prose, back again. Exercise 49 takes its name from Robert Louis Stevenson's essay “A College Magazine,” in Memories and Portraits (1887), where he says he always kept two books in his pocket, “one to read, one to write in,” and admits: “I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.” Both describe imitation as the way they learned to write.

Poetry and sound exercises

Poetry drills sharpen prose too: they train compression, sound and the line. For subjects to try them on, see the poetry prompts.

55. Three ways to break a line (15 min). Take a paragraph of your own prose and break it into lines three ways: at each breath, against the grammar, and on the strongest word. Read each version aloud and keep the one that changes how the words sound.
56. Ten images, keep two (15 min). Write ten one-line images of a single object, such as a house key, using a different sense or comparison each time. Keep the best two and build an eight-line poem around them.
57. Seventeen syllables (10 min). Describe something in front of you in the 5-7-5 syllable pattern often taught for haiku in English, then in one prose sentence of exactly seventeen syllables. Compare what each form made you leave out. The haiku examples show what the form can hold.
58. Pentameter by ear (20 min). Write four lines of iambic pentameter about a chore: ten syllables, with the stress on every second one. Mark the stresses, then read the lines aloud and fix any that only scan on paper. The guide to meter in poetry explains the feet.
59. A sonnet with a turn (30 min). Write a fourteen-line poem about your commute and put the turn, the volta, at line nine, where the poem stops being about traffic. See how to write a sonnet for the forms.
60. Half the words (15 min). Take a free-verse draft and cut every word that doesn't carry an image or a sound until it's half its length. Then put back the three words you miss most.

One exercise, start to finish

Here is exercise 3, the mood transfer, done in twenty minutes. Same street, same morning, two characters, and neither paragraph mentions the job.

Both paragraphs use the same three things: the ad, the bakery's blinds and the lottery man. What changes is which detail of each gets noticed and what the verbs do: scratched and counting against laughed and raised. The reader can guess each woman's morning without being told. That's the skill the exercise trains, and it's the same one show, don't tell asks for.

To check your own pair, underline every detail that differs between the two versions and circle the verbs. If you could swap the last sentences of the paragraphs and nobody would notice, the mood hasn't moved into the details yet. You're done when you have two paragraphs about the same place and the underlining shows the difference. To repeat the drill, keep the street and change the news, say a clean scan and a bad one, or keep the news and change the place. Log what you underlined each time.

How to practice with these exercises

Exercises tend to pay off when they're regular, short and aimed at a weakness. A routine that fits around a working day:

1. Pick by weakness, not by taste

   Choose from the group you avoid. For many writers that's revision. Ask a reader where your pages go flat if you can't tell.

2. Set the timer and stop when it rings

   The times above are limits, not targets. Most drills also name what you finish with: a paragraph, a page, a count. Stop at that or at the timer, whichever comes first, so the exercise doesn't turn into a two-hour polish of something you'll never use.

3. Use your own draft when you can

   Most exercises work on pages you already have. Cutting thirty percent from your own chapter shows you your own habits, and the chapter gets better too. If you need new material, draft it from a prompt in a separate session, then come back and drill it.

4. Compare with a model

   When the timer rings, read a published passage that does the same thing well: a description, an argument in dialogue, a scene in objective point of view. Note one specific thing it does that yours doesn't.

5. Log it in one line

   Write the date, the exercise number and one sentence on what you noticed. After a month the log shows which skills you've worked on and which you keep dodging.

Mistakes that waste practice time

• Practicing what you're already good at. It feels productive and changes little. If an exercise is easy, move to another group.
• Never bringing it back to the draft. An exercise that improves a practice paragraph but never touches your book has done half its job. After each one, find a page in your project where the same skill is needed.
• Skipping the comparison. Without a model, you only know that you did the exercise, not how well. The comparison shows you what to change next time.
• Overrunning the timer. A fifteen-minute drill that becomes an evening of polishing teaches polishing, which is a different skill.
• Throwing away a good result. Sometimes a drill produces a paragraph or a character you want. Keep it in your ideas file and come back to it as a story later. During the drill, stay on the skill.
• Doing exercises instead of the book. Drills are a warm-up, not a substitute. If every session is an exercise and the draft hasn't moved in a month, the problem may be elsewhere, and the guide to writer's block goes through the usual causes.