by Rachel D. Russell, @RDRussellWrites
When you’re between projects—or stuck in the mucky mire of one—it’s time to shake your brain synapses loose with creative writing exercises. They aren’t just for middle schoolers or high schoolers.
Trust me—they’re way more fun as an adult. In the business and busy-ness of writing for experience. The joy of creativity.
We can get locked up in our story and all the things we “know” about it—and we relinquish the wild abandon of making stuff up because we have our agenda: meet the deadline. Our thinking brain is so tangled in the details we can fail to see solutions or layers that we might add.
Here are five fun exercises to throw into the mix for sparking ideas and just because.
1.) Stream of consciousness. Have at it. Anything goes for this and I’ve found it to be particularly helpful in building sensory details into my scenes. Go for a walk and use a dictation app to describe what you’re thinking, seeing, feeling, smelling, hearing, and even tasting.
2.) Visual prompts. Flip through a magazine or websites and find a picture that niggles your curiosity and start noodling it. Create a scene or short story about it.
3.) Writing prompts or story starters. You can find websites with these or card decks. Use them as story seeds, character seeds, or to create goals, motivations, and conflicts. Play around with unexpected combinations.
4.) Turn up the tunes. Let a song set the stage for a story or scene. Maybe it’s a sad country song or something epic and classical. What’s the mood, who are your characters, what are they doing and feeling?
5.) Collaborate. Use any of these techniques with friends to create a cohesive scene or story. Working with other authors taps into our collective creativity, with one person’s idea often being the root of the next person’s idea. We all approach writing with our own personalities, pasts, and preferences. Collaboration brings a freshness to the page.
Take some risks on these because they don’t have a deadline or genre parameters or word count requirements. Who knows? You may find, in the middle of all this unleashed creativity, the answer you need to spice up your current work-in-progress.
Let me know how it goes!
He’s in Deep Haven to relax.
Detective Daniel “Boone” Buckam is more than burned out. After fourteen stellar years on the job, one bad judgment call—and, fine, a whole lot of cynicism—has forced him into a mandatory vacation. If he can get his head on straight, there’s a job as Police Chief waiting for him back in his Minneapolis suburb.
But then he meets Vivien.
Actress Vivien Calhoun isn’t really a drama queen. Sure, she gets swept up in the emotions of life—but please, she’s an actress. Or, um, was until a stalker made her flee the bright lights of Broadway. Now, she’s passionate about directing her local theater production. But when she accidentally ropes an uptight police detective on vacation into her cast, she can’t help but wonder if he might be the leading man she’s always longed for.
Of course, she’s in trouble.
Boone can’t help but like Vivien. He might even have a type—vivacious and bubbly, with a penchant for attracting danger. He can smell trouble even if she can’t, and is pretty sure her stalker has hunted her all the way to Deep Haven. He’ll have to stay by her side—even if it means being in her silly play—to keep her safe. But Vivien is more than he expected as she helps him discover a part of him he’s locked away…the part that said he could never love again.
So much for relaxing.
Rachel D. Russell writes contemporary inspirational romance focused on forgiveness, redemption, and grace. She’s the winner of the 2022 Oregon Christian Writers Cascade Award for published contemporary fiction with her debut novel, Still the One. Her second novel, Then Came You, released in July 2021. Her next release, It’s Your Love is scheduled for release in November 2023. She makes wild attempts to balance writing under publisher deadlines with her full-time career in the federal government. When Rachel’s not cantering her horse down the Oregon beaches, she’s probably interrogating her husband on his own military and law enforcement experience to craft believable heroes in uniform. The rest of her time is spent enjoying her active family, including two college-age sons and three keyboard-hogging cats.