FREE WRITING

Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4 | Step 5

MORE WRITING EXERCISES

What is the essay question of your piece? | What are your 3 doing words? | If you could write a letter to your past self | If you could write a letter to the world | C.S. Lewis Test | How does your subject relate to climate change? | A few last thoughts

WRITING STYLES

Prose | Spoken Word | Sonnet | Villanelle | Rap | Limerick

FREE WRITING

 This first exercise is one that’s meant to help you find your voice and feel empowered to use it. If you do nothing else on this page, do this. It takes less than 15 minutes and is a brilliant way to warm up your writer's brain. You can download this 5 step exercise as a worksheet by clicking the button below.

Step 1: Stream of Consciousness (2 mins)

Firstly, grab a pen and a pad and sit down in a space of your own. You can also use your computer, or record yourself speaking into your phone.

This exercise is based on associations and images which come to your mind when dwelling on certain topics. Try and write for one minute without lifting your hand off the page. Let your thoughts flow. Whatever your internal monologue is, write down every word. Forget punctuation, just write what comes to mind. The text you get after this exercise is raw, and may be completely meaningless, but it’s a great way to get started and get past the most daunting part of writing - the blank page.

Set a timer for 2 minutes and go.

Here’s what I came up with as an example:

‘Here we are both of us reading these words what a funny little thing we’ve found ourselves doing i can hear my head saying this as i type it kinda weird to be honest, it’s almost like it’s slowing down so that my fingers can catch up, i know, i said grab a pen and pad, but look at me, the irony, typing on a computer well you cant blame me im only human and i have flaws like all of us do, all of us have flaws, god now im even putting in comas when i specifically said dont worry about punctuation, jesus there i did it again, this is absolutely terrible of me, god i cant stop but anyways yeah this is kind of it there isnt much to it its just blablablablabla coming out of ya and youd be surprised how much this helps to just relax a little even though i have spent this entire exercise criticising the way ive done this exercise please dont sue me’.

Time’s up! There. You’ve written some stuff. Not so hard, right? Mine did not go as planned - and if yours didn’t, then you smashed it. There isn’t any planning involved, this is just meant to be whatever comes to you. You can use this when you get stuck, or when words just aren’t getting on the page. But even more usefully, you can use it for this next exercise.

Step 2: Targeted Stream of Consciousness (2 mins)

Now, find that one thing that is most important to you in the world. It can be honesty, it can be video games, whatever it is. A good way to figure this out, is to write down a list of 10 things you love in the world - and then 1 by 1, cut the ones that are less important until you’re left with your one most important thing.  (Alternatively, if you’re still stuck, just choose one thing you care about!)

Now write your chosen thing at the top of the page - this is your ‘checkpoint’. Repeat the exercise, however make sure it relates to this chosen thing. If you begin to stray, that’s okay too, just notice and try to bring yourself back to the subject. Set a timer for 2 minutes and go.

Here’s an example:

‘Pizza’

I love pizza my god who invented it i want to shake your hand so hard it’s ridiculous i love it for many reasons first of all it’s easily the best thing I ever put in my mouth have you ever had that thing where the cheese slightly tears and it’s gooey and you have to use your tongue to get the rest i mean that’s ridiculous that is just god’s honest design im not even religious but that is just heavenly it is it’s round it’s got a wide variety of different variations of itself, like what other food does that? Just goes, hey, yes you can have me plain, OR you can have these infinite variations of me by mixing and matching different toppings it’s a ridiculous food and i will fight anyone wh-

I think I’m learning that I’m hungry?

Step 3: Rapid fire actions (3 mins)

Now your brain’s kicking into gear. This next exercise will require the same absence of ‘meaning’ that we had in step 1. For 30 seconds, write multiple sentences non-stop that begin with the phrase 'I am going to'.

Here’s mine:

I am going to eat some food

I am going to die

I am going to want to do something later

I am going to want a piss

I am going to eat I swear to God I’m going to eat

I am going to cry eventually

I am going to pet a dog

Some weird stuff might come out. That’s cool. Then, repeat step 3 with the following sentence beginnings. Again, set a 30 second timer for each one.

• 'I am'

• 'I can hear'

• 'I am noticing'

• 'I feel'

• 'I remember'

• **************************INSERT LAST IMPORTANT POINT*************

Ie: I am a boy

I am a lovely man

I am a friend

I am loved

I am beautiful

I am astounded at the crisis in Ukraine

I am scared for those people

I am in love with this girl

Then again:

I can hear my laptop hissing

I can hear my fingers pressed against the keys on my keyboard

I can hear the wind outside

I can hear my tummy rumbling

I can hear 

Etc.. again with the other sentence starters. As you can all now clearly see, I should really eat something.

(Another tip specific for this competition - if you’re struggling to find what it is that’s important to you, try using step 3 of the Free Writing exercise but use the sentence starter: ‘what is important to me is’ - you may find what you’re looking for. 1 minute for that one.)

Step 4: Theme Bashing (1 min)

Now go back to the title you put down for step 2. Write that again at the top of a new page. You now have 1 minute to write the first 10 words that come into your head when you think of that title. They HAVE to be the first 10 words - I’m watching you…

Here’s mine…

‘Pizza’

Delicious

Round

Triangles

Cheese

Tomato

Crust

Pizzaiolo

Dough

Flour

God

I’ve also been very God-driven... Pizza is holy. Well done! Now you’ve got yourself some story pointers.

Step 5: Write your piece (4 mins)

Now we’re gonna write a thing. Write your title at the top of your page again. You have 4 minutes to write a short story for that title. You have to use all 10 words you came up with in Step 4 and incorporate them into the story - so write those down too and cross them off as you use them. This doesn’t need to make sense and can take whatever form it wants - whatever comes to you, let it play out - a speech, a scene, a song, a poem, ANYTHING. Here goes. 

Pizza 

-Delicious

-Round

-Triangles

-Cheese

-Tomato

-Crust

-Pizzaiolo

-Dough

-Flour

-God

“What is it?” God asked, confused.

Staring down at her table, unaware of whom had brought this round item.

“Is it you, Flour? Were you behind this?”

Flour came forward, sheepishly…

“Yes. Twas I. I was bored, your highness. Bored. One cannot be truly oneself when one is bored. Yet… boredom created a strange power within me. Creativity. Crusty, dough-like creativity. My mind went to places it had never been. I lost all sight of anything synonymous to failure. I saw triangles, splashing into cheese, merging into tomatoes, twas a dance in the stars betwixt the most heavenly of ingredients! I plucked them from the sky, and brought them to my magical mystery oven. I looked in the mirror. Flour was no more. I had become - Pizzaiolo”.

“Well go on, let's have a taste… Christ. Good lord. Pizzaiolo you son of a gun - it’s delicious”.

What the hell. Who cares? It’s a story. Will I use it? I don’t know! It certainly made me more hungry! The point is, you’ve written a story now. It may look like mine, or not at all! You may have written 5 words, or 500, whatever you’ve made, it’s your own. The point of these exercises is to show you you can write. And they are incredibly useful at getting stuff from your head, onto the page! Feel free to use it to your liking. 

MORE WRITING EXERCISES

Here are a few more exercises you can use! None of this is mandatory. It’s only for reference to help if you want it. Happy writing!

What is the essay question of your piece? 

One thing we recommend is to consider what the essay question of your piece might be. For example in our show, The Wicked Problem, our question is: 

What would you put first; your family or the planet?

That is undeniably dramatic. But it’s effective. What it allowed us to do was to always refer back to the essence of what we were writing and why we were writing it. It’s important to consider why you believe your chosen thing to be the most important in the world. It’s also important to think about how it relates to climate change. But ultimately, it’s about discovering what you want to ask your audience. The question can be as simple or complex as you want it to be, as long as it makes sense to you. You may find the question comes to you as you’re writing the piece - that’s okay too.

We try to make our essay question as fundamentally human as possible. 

What are your three doing words?

This is something we’ve done for each of our productions. The idea is to find 3 active words, verbs, which describe what your intention is within this piece in terms of affecting your audience. What do you want to do to your audience? Again, in The Wicked Problem, we landed on:

Entertain, Educate and Empower.

It just happened to be 3 e’s. But what it allowed us to do is to balance out the piece. We didn’t want it to be too heavy on the educational side, or it would’ve bored our audiences to death. Equally if it was only entertaining, it wouldn’t have had the substance we wanted to balance it with. Empowering was the hardest. With climate change, it’s very easy to discourage. It’s a scary topic and it feels overwhelming. We wanted to make sure the audience left feeling like they had agency, and were able to do something individually to help the climate crisis - start conversations.

You don’t have to do each word equally. It can lay heavily on one. That’s totally fine too. Make sure though that they are all ‘doing’ words, so that you can feel active when you write.

If you could write a letter to your past self, what would you say? 

Think of an event in your life that you would like to address, and write a letter as though you were a different person. Perhaps you want to give clarity to your younger self, or maybe there’s something you wish you’d known back then. Whatever it is, keep it clear and simple. This exercise can take as long as it needs to.

If you could write a letter to the world, what would you say? 

Perhaps using your chosen topic, imagine you could write a magical letter which would land in every single human being’s letterbox - translated or audio transcribed to whoever receives it in their own language. What message do you want to transmit to humanity? This can be as heartfelt, or as silly as you wish. You may want to give everyone a good laugh, or you might want to spread an important idea. This exercise can take as long as it needs to.

The C.S. Lewis Test

This is an exercise I believe all writers should do once they’ve completed a first draft. I strongly recommend you do this once you’ve finished yours. First let’s hear from the man himself:

‘Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was ‘terrible’, describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was ‘delightful’; make us say ‘delightful’ when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words - horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite - are only like saying to your readers: “Please will you do my job for me”.

To turn this into an exercise, look over your first or second draft and spot the times you’ve used words like ‘delightful’ or ‘terrible’ - descriptive adjectives, and try to use vivid description instead. ‘It was a terrible storm’ to ‘The storm was rampant, violently flailing like a wounded beast fending off its predator’. 

Also, look for moments where adjectives are repeating what the noun implies. Take the example of “blue sea”. We know the sea is blue - can you instead make this more vivid? Perhaps you can describe it like the first time you ever saw it, or the sea can be in a particular state in the context of your piece. Again, look for these adjectives, and make them more C.S Lewis.

How does your subject relate to climate change?

This is obviously not a given. We’ve found a lot of helpful resources can be found online - for example, typing ‘how does climate change affect’ and then entering your subject, you’ll probably land on at least one interesting article. Please check our resource page for more info. You can perhaps consider repeating the previous exercises and using climate change or the headline of the article you find as your topic or theme.

A few last thoughts

Ultimately, sometimes you just need to sit down and start writing. There’s a million other exercises (which you can find in the resources links) but at the end of the day, you pick a topic, you pick a theme, you pick a style, and you just go. Sometimes if your imagination is lacking, it helps to close your eyes and recall some memories or ideas that you’ve stored in your data bank. It’s also really helpful to keep drafts of your work rather than writing over the same text, just for reference. But most importantly - have fun. If your words make you laugh, or cry, or excite the kid inside you - then it’ll probably do the same to your reader.

Writing Styles

This section looks at a variety of different writing styles. It covers prose and poetry, including speeches (motivational, political, dramatic), spoken word, sonnets, villanelles, rap and limericks. There are of course other types of styles you can use, but these are some of the most common ones.

Prose

Prose is just written language without any particular structure. It’s chatting written down. This can be a very effective way to get an authentic version of your voice out, as it requires no strange rhymes and syllabic counting. It is often used in novels, newspapers, magazines, speeches, theatre, television and film. Prose can be poetic, which leans more into slam/spoken word, however it doesn’t have to be. It can be an old way of speaking, or a new form. It can be anything, and is the freest way to write. This little paragraph, would you believe it, is written in prose. Wow.

Non-dramatic

This can be personal, political, educational or activism. It is you speaking through with your own voice, there’s no character involved. It truly embodies your feelings and mind without any filter, or with certain filters to hide a deeper meaning, but the words are unequivocally you. Greta Thunberg is one of the best at this, because she speaks directly from her soul - she lives her words:

Dramatic

This covers many genres, however what we mean specifically is speaking through the voice of a character. This means creating a character and story. The character doesn’t need to be so far from yourself, but sometimes it helps to speak your own ideas through another voice to detach and protect yourself. Or maybe you just want to play around, or perhaps your word are intended to be spoken by someone else. 

An example of brilliant dramatic prose is Michaela Cole in ‘I May Destroy You’:

Spoken Word

Spoken word is a modern style of poetry with a lot of freedom in terms of structure, rhythm and rhyme. It has hints of internal rhymes, changes of pace and is usually meant to be spoken rather than read. Here is one by Lemn Sissay:

Let there be peace

So frowns fly away like albatross

And skeletons foxtrot from cupboards,

So war correspondants become travel show presenters

And magpies bring back lost property,

Children, engagement rings, broken things.

Let there be peace

So storms can go out to sea to be

Angry and return to me calm,

So the broken can rise up and dance in the hospitals.

Let the aged Ethiopian man in the grey block of flats

Peer through his window and see Addis before him,

So his thrilled outstretched arms become frames

For his dreams.

Let there be peace

Let tears evaporate to form clouds, cleanse themselves

And fall into reservoirs of drinking water.

Let harsh memories burst into fireworks that melt

In the dark pupils of a child’s eyes

And disappear like shoals of silver darting fish,

And let the waves reach the shore with a

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Sonnet

Here’s a style of poetry that is clear simple and effective. Shakespeare loved these. This is my personal favourite:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Ralph Fiennes does a version of this on YouTube - it’s brilliant. Here you have an iambic pentameter, which just means 10 syllables per line - though you can mess with this, and an abab rhyme, which is just lines 1&3 rhyme and lines 2&4. The last couplet also has a cc rhyme different to the rest. 

Villanelle

No not the character in Killing Eve. This poetry format was used a lot in the 20th century, and they still slap because of how structured they are. Every line has the same amount of syllables, and they are split into 5 tercets (3 lines) followed by one quatrain (4 lines) and have an ABA rhyme for the tercets and an ABAA for the final quatrain. The first line in the 1st tercet is repeated in the last line of the 2nd tercet, 4th tercet and the 3rd line of the quatrain, whilst the last line in the 1st tercet is repeated in the last line of the 3rd, 5th tercet and the quatrain. Confusing? Yes. Here’s an example to show what that means. Here’s one with 10 syllables in every line, a classic, by Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Watch Martin Sheen give his excellent rendition here.

Rap

Rap is hella subjective, and can be done in infinite ways. But it’s one of, if not the most impressive use of language, rhythm and rhyme. A few rules apply, like being in time with the beat and rhyming in couplets but even those are often broken. The best way to write rap, is to find a beat you like online, there’s plenty of free ones you can use on Youtube, and just have it play over and over again - make sure to have your subject ready, and just start to write. You will get sick of the song, but stick with it! 

I highly recommend watching a video of MF DOOM’s Figaro rhyme breakdown, just to see how one of the best ever would find rhymes in every line internally and kill the beat verbally… Couldn’t help it. The video, and the first two verses of it are below.

The rest is empty with no brain but the clever nerd

The best emcee with no chain ya ever heard

Take it from the tec-9 holder

Dead bent, but don't know their neck shine from Shinola

Everything that glitters ain't fish scale

Let me think, don't let her faint get Ishmael

A shot of Jack got her back, it's not an act stack

Forgot about the cackalack, holla back, clack- clack-blocka

Villainy, feel him in ya heart chakra chart toppa

Start shit stoppa be a smart shoppa

Shot a cop day around the way 'bout to stay

But who'd a know there's two mo' that wonder where the shooter go.

Limerick

These are fun, though perhaps a bit short. But it may give you an idea of how rhyme and rhythm can create humour in poetry. A limerick has five lines. The first, second, and fifth lines must have seven to ten syllables while rhyming and have the same verbal rhythm. The third and fourth lines only have five to seven syllables; they also rhyme with each other and have the same rhythm.

Unknown:

A circus performer named Brian,

Once smiled as he rode on a lion. 

They came back from the ride,

But with Brian inside, 

And the smile on the face of the lion.

Michael R. Burch:

Hawking, who makes my head spin,

says time may flow backward. I grin,

imagining the surprise

in my mother's eyes

when I head for the womb once again!

Michael R. Burch:

There was a young lady named Bright

who travelled much faster than light.

She set out one day

in a relative way,

and came back the previous night.