Back when I was in 7th grade, I took a summer sewing class. On the first day, they showed everybody how to work the sewing machine and then gave us pieces of paper to “sew” with a dull needle and no thread, so we could learn how to guide stuff through the feeds. I waited until the teacher was gone and then started my actual project; I didn’t see any point in sewing paper, when I already knew from the demo how the whole thing was supposed to work.

Okay, my first seam was a little more wobbly than it should have been, but it wasn’t bad enough to rip out, and it wasn’t even as bad as the worst one that somebody who’d been practicing all day with the paper did. And my second seam was better. And alright, maybe I’d have done a better job on the first seam if I’d spent time sewing paper first. But comparing the incremental benefit of the pointless paper-sewing with the amount of emotional annoyance it’d have caused me, I’m still glad I went straight to the material.

I feel the same way about most writing exercises. The idea is to learn a skill — dialog, narrative, characterization, description — that you’re going to need later on when you do your “real” story, but as far as I’m concerned, most of the time they’re just sewing paper with a dull needle. “Write a scene in which a character discovers he’s ill.” “One page describing the town you grew up in.” “Write a page of dialog between a man and his wife.” I’d much rather learn those things by writing pay copy; exercises are boring.

Then I started teaching, and ran into people who were have so much trouble with their pay copy that the only way I could think of to help them learn what they needed to know was, you guessed it, to give them exercises. And this bothered me, because I really hate most writing exercises, and here I was, making my students do them. It didn’t seem right.

But then I talked to one of the other writing teachers, and between us we came up with this analogy.

It’s like physical exercise — there’s “I’m going for a run and then I’m going to lift weights,” and there’s “I’m going to spend three hours shoveling the manure out of the barn.” Both things are “good exercise,” but only one is “an exercise,” because the point of the second thing is to get the manure out of the barn.

Some people (I’m one) need to go for a run and lift weights — to exercise — in order to stay fit, because their daily activities just don’t provide them with enough movement to stay fit. But for my uncles and cousins who farm, lifting weights after a day of hauling hay bales and shoveling manure and so on…well, it’d be fairly pointless. And this is also true for one or two of my friends who are passionate gardners, or who have strenuous hobbies. They get all the fitness they need from just living their normal lives.

So my attitude toward writing exercises has changed to a more typical (for me) “It depends on the writer.” If you are writing enough stuff, with enough variety to it, that it forces you to learn how to do all the basic writing things, maybe you don’t need to do writing exercises unless you think they’re fun. On the other hand, if you keep getting bogged down because you can’t do dialog, or action, or characterization, or some other basic writing thing, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt to find some exercises and see what you can make of them.

3 Comments
  1. I’m with you on the writing exercises. I spend most of my day writing (for my business, my blog and my fiction) that the idea of writing exercises seems kind of wasteful. I’d rather put the learning experience into whatever piece of fiction I’m working on at the moment.

    • Alex – The only exercises I’ve ever found useful for *me* were from Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft, and that was mainly because hardly any of them are the sort of thing you could or would actually do in a story unless you were being really experimental.

  2. Ooh, I’ll have to check that out. Her experimental short fiction is wild stuff!