Creative Writing Exercise
By Natalie Bright

The months of May and June have always been crazy for me. Instead of beating myself up about it, I’ve come to the realization that I most likely will not be engrossed in the old west world of my novel. Instead lengthy session at the keyboard, I use what little snippets of time I can snag to write blogs, short articles, research story ideas, and read writing books. Writing exercises are a good way to keep your skills and muse functioning, even though you can’t dig deep into the WIP.

In celebration of school ending and summer beginning, here’s a great writing exercise for you which will work for both short and novel length stories.

You will need several different colors of highlighters or colored pens.

1. Highlight or circle words which use the 5 senses
2. Highlight or circle dialogue
3. Highlight or circle descriptive phrases relating to place
4. Highlight or circle descriptive phrases relating to people

Were all 5 senses used?

Is dialogue spread throughout the story?

Are descriptive phrases spread throughout?

With a visual picture of your manuscript, you can determine necessary editing components. You should not have large segments of just dialogue or only description. This exercise was done at a writing conference, and I apologize for not making note of who taught the class, but I have done different versions of this over the years.

Wishing you time to write, write, write…