

You are looking at the pearls on a necklace. You don’t have to write it all out, or even finish it.

How do your ideas and thoughts hang together? Focus on the scaffolding of the scene. Work on experimenting with how you describe a scene, a character, a setting. Just bang out as many ideas as possible and don’t worry about the wording or getting anything polished. Here are some of the levels of focus this process can help expand and improve: But, writing a snippet every night - of anything and for no other purpose than to explore how you write - offers many benefits. This exercise is not for everyone, and if you are knee-deep in your dream project, stay there, of course! This is for other times.

They just need to push you forward in a single area of building your written fluency. The beauty is that they don’t need to be polished, or complete, or hit all the marks. Snippets can be used to hone your writing skills at any number of levels. They are building the muscles that run your creative mind. So, why do them? Because you learn an immense about yourself and the craft of writing when you do. Since they are of so little individual value, you shouldn’t stress over them. These snippets are useful in that they aren’t to show, or even to keep, unless you want to. You can write anything you like, just think about it critically and learn from it. The fact is, what you write doesn’t matter. You can determine why those particular words appeared and assess their quality at another time. Or freestyle - don’t dictate what purpose a snippet will serve. Since they are short and independent of one other (unless you choose to link them), you can work on many levels, honing skills that are transferable to the project in your heart. This exercise costs little effort, but over time can offer big gains. It’s an opportunity to give yourself complete freedom to write whatever spills out of your brain at that moment onto the page. The point is not to write a complete story, or the perfect book opening, or a brilliant, polished setting description. Writing snippets, from a paragraph to a short passage of text, can be freeing and educational. Share it - perhaps someone else will choose to extend it! If none of these prompts appeal, take the challenge and create your own.

Can you extend or even complete the story? If you feel like it, as a private exercise (or better yet, shared in the comments section), put your creative-writing brain to the task and decide what happens next. You can do anything you like with them or nothing at all. Think of them as opened-ended starts that lay down some basic constraints: a character, a setting, and a problem. There are three writing prompts at the end of this post. You might be itching to change up existing things on the page or to continue on. It’s often easier to start with something other than a blank page. They are usually a single idea to use as a starting point: write about a spaceship, a three-legged cat, or a pizza delivery man who goes to a house that’s on fire. The internet is replete with writing prompts for writers. Reading can bring out emotions you never expected, teach you new ways of relating to familiar situations, or be a way to experience something entirely new. It can be to draw a blank, feel nothing, or judge it as “awful.” It can be any range of other, more interesting and productive reactions. Writing snippets are practical, creative exercises that let you work on specific elements of your writing and explore styles outside your comfort zone.Įveryone has a reaction to writing.
