30-ish Generative Exercises for Writing
When You Don't Have Anything to Write About
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash
I just finished teaching a six-week writing class at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, and one of the resources my students asked for was a list of activities or questions that could help them generate good story ideas.
The world offers no end to writing ideas if you are looking for them. Once asked where he got his ideas, Neil Gaiman said, “I make them up. Out of my head.” He actually wrote a blog about idea generation, which is a great read for a meta-write reflection with students. I love his generation plan: ”You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.”
But sometimes students need to generate an idea that their boredom or their daydream hasn’t rendered for them, and in those times, it helps to have a teacher who can offer something to prime the pump. To that end, I have compelled thirty-ish exercises I have used in the past that have helped my students find their story.
Generative Activities:
Investigate your personal beliefs. What you value goes to the very heart of your writing. What do I believe about the nature of the universe and your place in it? What do I believe about faith? What do I believe about political power? What is something I believe to be true yet I can’t prove it? Spend some time writing about your values and beliefs, and see what stories emerge.
Draw a map of the earliest place from which you have memories. It could be a city block, a farm, a subdivision, a housing project. Include everything in the place – roads, barber shops, creeks, gas stations, churches, vacant lots. Then label all the places, ex. “Zippy’s Gas Station” or “Town Branch Road.” If you don’t remember the names of the people who lived in certain houses, write labels such as “old man with 8 cars.” Finally visit the place from a story perspective, remembering as many things as possible that happened there, writing a few lines about each story or memory.
Carry an observation log. Cultivate the writerly habit of compulsive recording. Even more important than the chronicling is the action that comes before the chronicling: the noticing. The point is to develop a habit of noticing things and writing them down. It’s refreshingly simple. Fill up every page with things you notice. Carry a small notebook for one week and write down observations in the cafeteria, on the bus, at the pep rally, at temple.
Buy an old art book at the Goodwill store, and write the “story” that is on the canvas or off the canvas of each painting or art work. How did this piece of art come into being? Tell that story. What story does or doesn’t the art tell?
Find an old dictionary or encyclopedia that your library is giving away for free, and chop up a page or two, putting the slips of paper into a bag. Draw one or two out and do a timed freewrite, free associating ideas and stories that come from those words. Write for five minutes about what a word makes you think of. What stories emerge?
Go to a public place and observe people. Imagine what their lives are like. Select one person and imagine what one regret they carry with them. What is one desire or goal that they have? Are they happy or fulfilled? Tell their story. (H. E. Bates wrote small biographies of people he would glimpse on trains, in parks, in cafes in London. These biographical sketches became the basis of his fictional characters.)
Go to a public place and eavesdrop on a conversation. Jot down just what the people say devoid of context, then supply your own story that establishes the high stakes of a relationship on the brink of disaster or on the brink of reconciliation.
Go to a cemetery in your town. Wander around and find a family or an individual headstone whose name is intriguing. Check out the dates of birth and death. Consider what history this person lived through. Write a story about their life.
Randomly select some music that you don’t normally listen to on whatever platform you find music (Spotify, Apple Music, Beats1, NPR’s Tiny Desk, etc) Listen to four or five selections of the same kind of music to get into the vibe or energy of the music. Write a story based on the style of the music- jazz, blues, classical, old country, swedish death metal, etc. Where does it lead you?
Go to Random Street View and write a story that takes place in the first street view that speaks to you. Use Map Crunch which has a View of the Day offering. Look at the landscape. Try to smell, touch and feel it through a story that captures its essence.
Read some poetry or short stories and write down your reactions to the language, the story, the plot. Steal a line or a character or a plot twist from something you’ve read as a starting point for your own story.
As legendary filmmaker Akira Kurosawa says, “My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always kept a notebook handy when I read a book. I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of breakthrough. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.”
Using the below Somebody Wanted Something But (SWSB) stem, write out a couple of story concepts
________________ (the main character) wants __________(the main character’s motivation), but ___________ (the conflict the character faces), so ___________(the resolution).
Generative Questions:
What is the story that you most want to tell?
What is the kind of story that you most like to read?
What would a story based on one portion of your life be about?
What is a character in your life that is so interesting they could spawn a whole novel?
What is a positive personality trait (such as committed to ideals) and its antithesis (such as stubborn, rigid or inflexible) that you’d like to explore in a character?
What is a literary or historical character that you’d like to revisit through a more contemporary lens? What story would you like to tell about them that hasn’t been told?
What is a time in history you find fascinating? What stories bubble up for you when you meditate on that time?
What is a geographical place you constantly want to explore? What stories bubble up for you when you think about or “visit” this place?
What is a large universal theme you’d like to explore? What stories emerge from that theme?
What is a dramatic cause-and-effect premise, such as “laziness leads to ruin” or “suffering leads to compassion” that you could write a story around?
Generative Plot Ideas:
A cataclysmic event has or is occurring (tsunami, hurricane, imminent nuclear war) and everyone is fleeing the area. Your character chooses to stay. Why or why not? Consider a character with a high profile job in government who lied about her credentials to get the job and now someone has discovered the fraud. What will your character do to protect their reputation?
Choose a frustrating, but non-violent problem (someone steals an Amazon package off my porch or rear-ends you at a traffic light) and in solving the problem, the situation becomes life-threatening.
Choose an morally-objectionable character to tell the story of a saint. What is revealed?
At her mother’s funeral, a character discovers the man she’s called Dad her whole life isn’t her biological father. What happens?
A character is doing something mundane, like waiting for a bus or checking out at the grocery store, when they witness something that changes their life. What happens?
Think of a small town protecting a secret that their survival depends on. Your character objects to the secrecy and desires to expose it. What happens when they do?
Your character has a deeply disturbing dream about a person they’ve never met and that person shows up as a new employee at work the next day. What happens?
The perfect couple moves into a house that destroys their marriage. How? Why?
A character flees their abusive spouse and must go on the run. The journey becomes more harrowing than what they left behind. What happens?
Two characters that shouldn’t - a teacher and their student, a criminal and their lawyer, a layperson and their clergy - fall in love. What happens?