“Giant Golden Buddha” & 364 More 5 Minute Writing Exercises
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Please feel free to use these exercises for your writing group or classroom; however, for permission to reprint on-line, in a magazine, book, or other format, please contact me for permission.
WELCOME! From October 1, 2005- September 30, 2006 I posted on my website a daily 5 minute writing exercise addressing aspects of craft as varied as point of view, dialogue, plot, synthaesthesia, body language, imagery, and beginnings. Most of the exercises are mine, but several are from other poets and writers, as you will see. “Giant Golden Buddha” and the other 364 are now posted here. May they be both fun and useful for your creative writing.
WHY FIVE MINUTES?
Five Reasons for 5 Minutes
1. To Train the Brain to Get Into the Habit of Writing
How do you write a 500 page book? Or, for that matter, a poem? A piddling 5 minutes at a time. When you’re not feeling ready to commit to writing a short story, magazine article, or, (gulp) a novel, brief exercises (which of course, can expand to any length of time) can serve as a bit of track to run on, as it were. The more often you write, the easier it gets.
2. To Train the Brain to Imagine More Vividly with Ease
And how do you conjure a vivid world for readers? By use of vivid detail that appeals to the senses (smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch), by convincingly conveying other points of view and by playfully exploring that ever-strange energy of ‘what if?’ For the most part, these are the tasks of the 5 minute writing exercises.
3. To Enhance the Flow Tomorrow
Alas, there are days— even for full-time writers— when it is impossible to block out the ideal number of hours for writing. On such days, if you can write intensely for 5 minutes— even just 5 minutes— the writing “muscle” stays pumped so that the following day, the writing once again flows.
4. To Bust a Block
For those with writers block— whose excuses usually include variations of “I don’t have time” and/or “my writing must be super special & perfect or else why bother”— five minutes is a low bar indeed. (By the way, if the block is bad, try setting an alarm clock or an egg timer, and promise yourself, when it rings in 5 minutes, you’ll quit writing. A bit of reverse psychology.)
5. To Seed Something Big & Wonderful
YES!
3 Tips for You
#1:
Always keep your pen on the page,
or fingers on the keyboard—
unless you want to stop writing.
#2:
Think of detail that appeals to all of the senses.
#3:
No rules. Yes, fun.
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