5.2: Fiction Exercises

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chapter 5: fiction exercises

These may or may not be assigned by your instructor, but they are still really cool exercises!

exercise 1:

Listen to a song, imagine its music video, and then write the story of that music video.

exercise 2: bad fairytale.

Write a fairytale that starts with “Once upon a time…” but turn the fairytale formula upside-down and make sure we don’t learn any lessons from it.

exercise 3: random page.

Pull a book from your shelf, open to a random page, pick a random sentence, and use that sentence as the first line of a short story.

exercise 4: finish tweet.

Finish the story from the tweet that begins the Flash Fiction chapter.

exercise 5: eavesdrop.

Write in public (a coffee shop, a library), and eavesdrop on someone else’s conversation. Snatch a line you hear and write a story around it.

exercise 6: love and hate.

Describe the same character - in the first description, make the reader fall in love with them; in the second description, repulse the reader.

exercise 7: bedroom.

Describe a young character's bedroom using the setting to reveal the character. What does the furniture look like? What's on the walls? In the drawers? Under the bed?

“Lie about everything but passion. Chairs can talk. Pigs can fly. But if you don’t care about what you’re saying, no one else will.”

---Meg Rosoff