Five quick writing exercises for when you only have ten minutes

Fitting writing into your daily routine can be easy, even if you have as little as ten minutes in which to put pen to paper.

Here are five very quick creative writing exercises that will help build your skills as a writer.

Exercise 1: The metaphor list

Try scribbling down as many metaphors as you can think of in ten minutes. An easy way to do this is to start with two columns, one filled with concrete, real-world nouns, and the other with abstract concepts such as love, war, fear, hope. Now take one random word from the first column and a random word from the second and see how they might fit into a metaphor. For example, take the word ‘table’ and the word ‘relationship’, and you might come up with something like ‘Their relationship was like a solid farmhouse table, sturdy and dependable’.

All writing can be strengthened with carefully chosen figurative language, and this exercise is great for making you think creatively about metaphors and how they might be incorporated into your own work in progress.

Exercise 2: The power of five

If you’re still in the preparation stage and haven’t yet started writing your book, this is the exercise for you. Take ten minutes to quickly write down five potential plot twists, five possible subplots, five surprising things about your main character, five possible new settings and five possible endings.

This exercise at the plotting stage gets you to think about all the different paths your story could take. You may find that some of the ideas you come up with are actually a lot better than what you’re currently planning, or could be woven in to make your story richer.

Exercise 3: The alternative paragraph

Pick a random paragraph from your work in progress and spend a couple of minutes trying to memorise it. Afterwards, cover it up and then try to rewrite the whole thing from memory. You probably won’t be able to remember it word for word beyond the first sentence or two, so what you’ll end up doing is rewriting much of it.

This makes you focus very hard on the word choices you make as you fill in the blanks. Afterwards, you can compare the new and old versions and cherry pick the best of both, so you end up with a third version that combines the best writing.

Exercise 4: The character sketch

Pick an interesting name from a magazine or online news site, something that jumps out at you. Take ten minutes to write a quick character sketch of that person based solely on their name and your own imagination.

This is a really fun way to practise character creation and test your powers of description. You never know, you may like the character you create so much that you can add them into your story or base a new story around them.

Exercise 5: The obituary

Pretend you character has died and you’re penning their obituary. Take ten minutes to ask yourself what they would be most celebrated for, what other people would say about them, what their biggest successes and failures were and how history will remember them.

If you’re in the middle of writing a novel, you can often begin to feel too close to the characters. This exercise forces you to take a step back and look at them in the bigger picture. It also adds a bit more flesh to them and perhaps gets you to think about their lives before and after the events of your novel.

Quick writing exercises like this can be peppered throughout your day, so even when you only have a few minutes to spare, you can still be improving as a writer.

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