Notes

10 exercises & tips for creative writing

Good writing is difficult for many people. It can be very helpful at work, at university and even in everyday life. Everyone can learn it by working on their vocabulary and creativity. We have 11 exercises for beginners and advanced writers to overcome their creative block.

Learning to write at the distance learning school


Learning to write at a distance

Writing expressive texts is a craft and can be learned as such. Our following tips and exercises are a good aid to overcoming blockades and putting better texts on paper.

If you want to improve your written expression professionally - for example, to be able to put literary or journalistic projects into practice - you would be well advised to take a course. Writing courses are available at numerous adult education centres or at distance learning colleges, although the latter naturally allow for much more flexible learning.

The course Become an Author - Learn to Write from Germany's largest distance learning school ILS imparts extensive knowledge in 31 study booklets plus accompanying learning material. The course is supervised by experienced authors and editors who provide individual assistance in the preparation of ever better texts. At the end of the 18-month course (standard time), participants will be able to write a wide range of texts, from short journalistic articles to novels of several hundred pages. Further information on the course is available free of charge from the ILS.

To the ILS

Learn to write better for your job
Learn to write better for your job

Especially in management positions, it is an advantage to be able to express oneself. In this way, you not only maintain respectability, but can also represent your chosen management style appropriately.

Situations in which a confident choice of words is required are letters of recommendation, e-mails to employees or speeches. Good writing here does not mean that you should be particularly imaginative in your use of language, but simply know how to use the language you are given and exploit its variations.

Even as an employee, but especially as a job seeker, there are countless advantages to being able to write well. In general, a letter of application, and especially a letter of motivation, needs to be wordy. The first sentence is particularly important and should encourage you to read on. If you write regularly, you will have an easier time.

Learn to write better for your studies
Studying requires a lot of writing. Whether it's a seminar paper, an internship report, a Bachelor's or Master's thesis - sooner or later everyone has to write. With academic papers, writer's block often interferes with the flow of writing.

If you are practised in writing, this can not only help you find a topic, but also ensure a good reading flow. If you can think creatively, you will quickly come up with many ideas and be able to weigh up which topic is right for you. Your ability to play with words and not write too awkwardly makes for a pleasant reading flow.

Learning to write better for everyday life
How to write better texts in everyday life

The ability to write well can often be useful in everyday life. Just think about how often you write cards and find yourself at a loss for words. If you do our exercises, you won't have such a hard time writing cards in the future.

You will be able to write birthday wishes, love letters, Christmas greetings, New Year's greetings, thank you notes and even funny sayings in no time. Even bedtime stories for your children, nephews and nieces will no longer be a problem.

Here we explain how you can learn to write more creatively.

Exercises and tips for better writing
Exercises for learning to write better

With these exercises you can learn to write better. It is important to be consistent and to do all exercises consciously.

Good writing has countless benefits that extend to all sorts of areas of your life. The exercises are suitable for both novice writers and writers who are writing a text or a book and suffer from a sudden lack of creativity. Your thinking will open up and your writer's blocks will dissolve.

All beginnings are not so difficult...
You are sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper. How do I start? How do I express myself? What sounds exciting? What is the first word? Forget all these questions that only confuse you more. Just start the writing process somewhere. Forget the writing norms you learned at school.

When writing, nothing has to be meticulously thought out, in the right order, or educational. Write whatever comes to mind. It doesn't matter in what order you write things down, you can always change it later. With this first sentence, which you can get from somewhere, you will have a beginning later.

Example: Use the end as a beginning

I went to university today. For free. Our seminar was cancelled. I guess the lecturer didn't think it was necessary to notify us. That means I could have saved myself the unbearably stuffy and shaky bus ride, during which I was surrounded by viruses and probably caught five different diseases.

I could have slept in and had a cup of tea in my nice fluffy blanket instead of also waiting 20 minutes in the freezing cold for the permanently delayed bus.

I could also have stayed up late yesterday to deepen my writing practice and finally learn this mystery called "writing". Well, too late. New day, new luck.

Automatic writing
Automatic writing

The first help for a writing beginner is automatic writing. If you have problems concentrating, write down just that. What is going through your mind right now?

Even if your text starts like this: "I'm sitting here and I don't know what to write, so I keep thinking, let's see. What am I doing right now? I'm looking out the window and I see a bird..." it will probably lead you to a source of inspiration sooner or later.

Even if you are not kissed by the muse, at least you have practised writing.

More techniques for finding inspiration can be found here.

Develop a routine for better writing
Writing should not be a process that fills you with discomfort or stress. You shouldn't have to think for five minutes before you can write a sentence. To really get into a writing flow and to start writing quickly, you need a routine.

You develop this routine by simply writing consistently for ten minutes a day. This doesn't mean WhatsApp messages or lists, but real writing. Write about your emotions or try to describe your experiences vividly.

It doesn't matter whether you write on your computer, your mobile phone or on a piece of paper. The content is also secondary, it's about formulating regularly and playing with words.

Try oral writing
Oral writing

Oral writing is actually a contradiction in terms. How can writing be oral? One writes in writing. Yes, but oral writing means that you write in a similar way to how you speak.

Similar and not the same is because you leave out all the filler words like "um", "halt" or "so" and don't have to repeat yourself. Readers are expected to pay more attention than listeners.

So once you've given a piece of information, you don't have to repeat it because you're afraid the other person will have forgotten it. However, there is nothing wrong with an oral style of writing.

Most readers - apart from the sophisticated and highly educated - enjoy it when the text is loosened up by everyday language and small interpolations of thoughts. There is a high potential for identification, so they are more likely to sympathise with your writing style and empathise with you.

It depends on the genre and the readership, but the fact is that creative texts are easier to read if they are not peppered with turgid terms and long sentences. So don't be afraid to use the language you would use orally. The thought process is significantly shortened because you don't have to look for alternative words to replace your everyday language.

Emotions: Get excited
By getting excited, you can practice getting into a writing flow. Think about a critical topic or a person who particularly upsets you. You will notice that suddenly many things come to mind and you will start to write faster in your anger.

Forget political correctness for a few minutes and let it all out. No one will ever read this little text if you don't want them to. Draw on your repertoire of negative phrases and comparisons. When it comes to strong emotions, we are often more creative than we think.

Think in pictures
Think in pictures

The true art of writing is thinking in pictures. You can best convey what you mean to the reader by showing it. To do this, you have to open up and allow wild ideas.

As a rule, comparisons help to show something vividly. The comparisons don't have to be realistic, it's just important that everyone can imagine them.

For example, if you compare something to a certain scene in a certain film, you exclude readers who have not seen the film. To help you understand what we mean, here are a few examples:

This table was just hideous. It looked like a tree stump with a saucer from my great-grandmother's tea service on it. They had really paid that much for that? Really, it's like when my four-year-old sister tries to put on make-up, I just can't look.

I walked into the living room and laughed out loud. My dog was lying on the carpet like he was just at a beach photo shoot. His back legs were crossed, he was stretching and had one front leg under his head. The look on top of that was the best - a bedroom look like I had never seen from a model on TV.

Wow, now that Margaret had said it, I see it too. This man does look like a turtle: small eyes, a wrinkled neck, no hair and his gait might suggest he's carrying something heavy on his back. But still, I love my husband.

My mother constantly grumbles about my room: "This place looks like the TV series 'The Messie Team'!" ... It's not that dirty. There's just dust on top of dust and well, maybe a layer of dust underneath. At least you can't see the empty bottles lying underneath so well.

Rendering content differently
Reproduce content differently and change your perspective

When you do your daily writing exercises, you should always try to reproduce the same content in a different way. This way you use words that you would not necessarily use in everyday speech.

They will become more and more established in your vocabulary over time and it will be easier for you to find variations. You can also put the content in different perspectives. Do you tell the story happily or sadly? Is it in the first person or from another point of view? Here are a few examples to guide you.

First person narrator, happy
I was in the supermarket today and wondered why I suddenly got such a funny feeling. Something reminded me of the past. Was it a smell or did I subconsciously see something that reminded me of someone?

It took me a while to realise. I was standing in front of the icebox and suddenly the scales fell from my eyes: as a child, I always loved my grandma's pistachio ice cream. They had exactly the kind in the freezer that grandma and I had eaten on warm days in our garden.

First-person narrator, melancholy
Today in the supermarket I had a strange epiphany. At first I was confused, but then it suddenly came to me. Grandmother and I used to love pistachio ice cream when I was a child.

The very variety we both loved so much was in front of me in the freezer. I remembered the wonderful summer days when we ate the ice cream with relish in our garden.

A pleasant warm feeling developed inside me, which gradually turned into sadness. I gulped, realising that my childhood was over and those times would never return.

Auctorial narrator, figurative
The figurative auctorial narrator

A girl came into the supermarket, walked a bit and finally stopped in front of the freezer. She was thinking. A memory flashed through her mind and she smiled. Right in front of her she saw the delicious pistachio ice cream she used to eat with her dear granny.

The memories of the good times came back. She could literally taste the ice cream, feel the sun and even hear her grandmother's happy laughter, the birds chirping and the wind rustling. This feeling has become the epitome of home for her.

Autobiographical self-reflection
This exercise is a kind of self-therapy to open the mind for creativity. It really means nothing more than writing a diary. If you follow the exercise that says to write for ten minutes every day, you can directly link it to self-reflection.

By writing in a diary, you get to know yourself better. Your experiences and memories make you the kind of person you are, and therefore the kind of writer you are.

Do you avoid certain topics or emotions? Is there one person in your memoir that comes up particularly often? What is your writing style? Writing in diary form is also a kind of self-therapy.

It is a way to process things that would otherwise not be said, but are obviously on your mind. If you are open to yourself, you can also be so when writing, because writing always requires that you reveal a little of yourself.

Write without distractions
Ensure distraction-free writing in your regular writing exercises. Otherwise you risk interrupting your writing flow and losing the thread. Often you get inspiration when you are not expecting it.

A room with a window is particularly suitable for quiet reflection. Observe the people, the streets or nature. What comes to your mind about them? Even a single word on a street sign can give you a great idea for a little story.

So make sure you're not disturbed, put your phone away and turn off background noise such as the TV. Concentrate only on your thoughts.


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