Writing Exercise: The First Face You See

Where do you write? Do you have pictures on the walls? Windows? Is it a coffee house where you escape the noise and chaos of home? Are you alone or are there people? When you look up from this blog post, whose is the first face you see?

Make a note of it. Because that’s the person you’ll be writing about for the next five minutes.

For me, it’s Flannery O’Connor. I have a drawing of her on the wall behind my computer. Watching me. Most likely judging me. But I’m going to try to forget she’s an iconic American writer for the time being and try to just look at her face and give her a story. And I want you to do the same, with the first person you see. If you know them, forget their name. If you don’t, give them one.

Five minutes. Go.

Advertisement

Writing Exercise: I Hate Mondays

I would guess that every teacher of creative writing has, at some point, admonished his or her students not to use clichés. But you know what? I love clichés. Like I love sentence fragments. And starting sentences with conjunctions. And exclamation points!

Okay, I don’t love clichés, but I do love a challenge and clichés can provide that: How do you turn a cliché into something new?

So. Let’s try it.

The cliché of the day: I hate Mondays. BUT! Can you use it outside its clichéd context? Jot down a few ideas–this is a writing exercise, so I’ll limit you to three. Do that now, before you read the rest of this post. When you’re done, scroll down and read mine: