Practice

Below you will find a series of exercises in word production.  How many words can you get on the page – without stopping?  Your task is to take the word that I tell you and run with it…wherever your imagination takes you.  Don’t think…write.  Don’t fight the words…write the words.

My recommendation is to make these part of your daily writing warm-up exercises.

Why am I starting with only one minute?

One minute doesn’t seem like a long time…until you are faced with a blank page.  For the first five days, I only want you to write – without stopping – for only one full minute.  For the next five days, I want you to write for three minutes without stopping.  For days eleven through twenty, I want you to write for five full minutes.   For days twenty-one through twenty-five, I increased the time to seven minutes.  For the remainder of the thirty days, back it down to five minutes of non-stop writing.  Once you are comfortable with five minutes, then this should serve you well as a warm-up exercise.

You are trying to build up the habit of writing without thinking.

After thirty days of practice, you should be able to come up with your own writing prompts.  They can be single word prompts or more.  Whatever suits you.  It is your writing.

What does this look like?  What does it look like when I sit down with pen and paper and just write?

That’s an excellent question.  Watch the video below to find out.  In the video, I wrote for three minutes and I used a single word writing prompt.

The single word writing prompt was train.  Here is what I wrote: train – a wagon train. a train of thought. Methinks thou thought too much.  of chickens.  Lean and hungry chickens like Cassius whom Caesar did not entrust with his back.  A train of Senators did fall upon Caesar – it was the Ides of March.  Beware!  Lest you greed and ambition pluck you from your place as it did Caesar.  Now we know him as a salad.  With anchovies.  I can’t stand the fish, but I would have met the man.  Certainly it would be fascinating to know the man who was Caesar – emperor of Rome.  But no…alas the Senators would see to it that he would not rule Rome.  The city of 7 hills – was it seven?  I know not as I am consumed with thoughts of vinegar and oil dousing the delicate fronds of lettuce.  Let us all join hands, friends, Romans, countryman.  How much more madness can we take ere Pax Romana reigns again.  Now we have poutry peace – Pax Pullus.  Because the chicken had to cross the road.

Please note that there are some minor errors in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation.  And a whole lot of nonsense.  I was not concerned with such errors as I wrote because I would fix them during the editing process.  For the purposes of this activity, my sole concern was with getting words on the page.  And I did not stop writing.  At all.  There were no pregnant pauses when I considered my next word.  I just wrote.  That’s all.

Points to consider: I would like you to use a timer and/or stopwatch (most people have them on their phones), but I don’t want you to be fanatical about the time.  Maybe you are writing for only a single minute and the timer sounds, and you are in the middle of a sentence.  Finish the sentence.  Maybe it’s good writing and you want to get it down on paper.  Finish it.  Just because the timer sounds doesn’t mean you have to stop.  Also, I recommend using pen and paper for these exercises.  Again, there is no need to strictly adhere to my directions, but for the purposes of these exercises, pen and paper are better tools for getting words on the page.

Below you will find thirty days of writing prompts.  Some prompts include images.  The images are from pulp magazine covers, and they are intended to be fun.  After that, there are only words as writing prompts.

I recommend having your pen, paper, and timer at the ready before clicking on the writing prompt.