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Some Exercises in the Craft of Writing
There was a really interesting conversation on Tumblr recently about how to practice writing as a craft (read the reblog comments too, they're all interesting), especially compared to other creative arts like music and visual art, and it was full of interesting thinky bits and any of you who are trying to be better writers should read it.
Anyway, I didn't speak up there because a) still refuse to discuss anything with any depth via tumblr sorry, and b) what I had to say is sort of orthogonal to the fascinating points they were making. But I have had "post about the stuff you do as writing exercise/practice/warmup" on my list for awhile, and I am fresh off a triumphant tenth massive failure at NaNo, so here is a list of five things I do as a writer that I do sort of think of as the equivalent of an artist doing drawing exercises or a musician doing scales or a boxer jumping rope, and that I think address, at least a little bit, the question from the tumblr thread of how you divide "write a thing" up into individual, simpler skills that can be practiced without having do everything at once.
Though first I should say that every brain works differently and every writer has a different way of working with words, so probably most of these will make no sense to most of you. Also, the first and always advice for being a better writer is the same advice for anybody trying to be better at any skill of any kind - do it a lot, do it with discipline, keep doing it. And read what other people are doing, too, read constantly.
The below are just things I have worked out as semi-effective substitutes for being disciplined and diligent, that I can do when I make time or in-betweens, because let's face it, disciplined and diligent is just not happening anytime soon for some of us, and they're things that work for me, more-or-less, or at least they feel like they work. But also, I think there's a tendency with beginning writers to steer them away from these kinds of exercises, because it is easy to fall into doing "writing exercises" instead of actually writing things. All the same, though, I think some of them can be very useful, as long as you keep in mind that they aren't a substitute for actually writing, so it seemed like they were worth sharing.
Also someone recently asked me how I managed to sit down two nights before an exchange fic was due with a blank page and end up with 7000 words of passable fiction by the deadline. My best answer was something like "Well, didn't write anything down until then, but I'd been working on writing it for months..." This is sort of the expanded version of that answer.
In terms of trying to separate the various skills that go into "writing" in order to practice them individually without having to juggle everything at once, one of the really basic skills that goes into writing is "thinking up the story". And you can do all the plotting worksheets and timelining and prompt generating you want, and that can help, but it can also end up as a way to not have to just get in there and practice thinking up your story. So I block out time for myself to just practice putting the story together in my head, without worrying about anything else.
Usually what I do is give myself a set period of time (10-15 minutes, usually, depending on how much time I have to work with?) and do something that uses enough of my brain that I don't get distracted, but doesn't used the parts of my brain that go into making stories - something that keeps me busy but doesn't engage my verbal brain, my creativity, or my critical thinking very much. My favorites are long walks, coloring books, and mindless puzzle games like Tetris or Bejeweled, but ymmv. And then I spend that time doing the mostly-mindless thing and thinking about what I want to be writing, without being allowed to actually write anything down.
Not being allowed to write anything down - not even notes - removes some of the pressure to come up with permanent answers and make everything work just right. The goal here is not to figure out exactly what you're going to write, it's not to come up with a finished outline or a complete scene, any more than the goal of the batter taking practice swings is to make the exact swing he will use later - the goal is to just move things around in my head until I have practiced shaping this story enough that when I do have a blank page in front of me, I am familiar enough with it that I can put the pieces of it together later without having to think through every step.
Obviously you can think about what you want to be writing without having a set-out time to do it, and if you are someone who writes you probably already spend a lot of time doing that whether you plan to or not, but I find the set-aside time helpful. Because it's harder than it seems to give myself permission to just sit and think about just writing and not anything else. And also, ramming it into my head that thinking about the stories I am working on counts as doing writing work and not just slacking off is I think one of the things that has helped me as a writer more than anything else I have learned about writing in the last ten years. Staring vaguely into the middle distance is part of the writer's craft; it isn't just hands-on-keyboard time that counts.
(When your being-a-writer time becomes 100% staring out window and 0% words on page it's a problem, yes. This is why I set a time limit when I'm doing it seriously. But even when it's 100% staring-out-window time and writing isn't happening, having beaten this into myself helps, because hating myself for not having hands on keyboard doesn't actually make it more likely to happen. And spending the time staring out the window - even when it's 15 weeks instead of 15 minutes - does make the writing happen better when it finally does happen.)
A place. A person. A thing. An event. A sensory experience. An emotional state. A conversation between passers-by. A movement. Anything real, that you can observe: sit and observe it, and then, while it's still present right there, capture it as best you can on the page. Like an artist's sketching from life, it will feel really hard if you've never done it before, and what you get on the page may not resemble the real thing, and you'll be tempted to spend way too much time on trying to get every sketch just right, but the more you do it, the more it becomes just a way of practicing, and the faster and more accurate you get, and the more you find yourself getting comfortable with your style instead of just aiming for accurate.
This is obviously partly about practice with writing descriptive passages, with learning what details are important and what order to go in and how much context to include and so on, but more than that, it's about building a repertoire of things you know how to write accurately - just like an artist doing life drawing learns basic anatomy until they can draw a person accurately without needing a model in front of them, a writer sketching people from life learns the basics of how people are put together, and from that can build better characters later. And similarly with working with emotions and places and so on - sketching from life teaches you how they're put together, and how to take them apart and rebuild them, much more vividly and creatively and accurately than any other way will teach you.
This is something else that I think I saw in various writing-advice places but never in a form that resonated with me: there would be individual exercises, 'describe a person you know', 'write x words about this photograph', or something, but I never made the connection that what I needed to do was not 'a writing exercise', it was to go out and sketch from life, the same way I do with my art. I feel like this is something the writer's art has lost - "Sketches" used to be a pretty common term for short, not-terribly-polished, semi-nonfictional vignettes, that might get published if the author came back and thought it was good, but then again, might never leave the sketchbook. It's also, I think, something that private journaling can approach, especially when it's journaling that's more outwardly focused, more about recording daily life than about analyzing experiences or working through them emotionally.
Also, if you're still intimidated by the blank sheet, or you find it hard to do rough sketches in a notebook without going overboard, this isn't necessarily even something you have to write; this practice is about learning how to transform real life into words, not about learning how to put words in fixed form, so while there's definitely value in doing it as a written exercise, there's also value in just doing it in your head - the next time you're standing in line or waiting for transportation, pick something or someone around you and think about how you would write about that if you put it in a story - try different things, play with it in your head. Do it until it becomes second nature.
This is something that, oddly, doesn't seem to get mentioned in a lot of 'how-to-write' sources, I guess because 'do crossword puzzles' doesn't sound like something a 'real writer' does. But yes. Do crossword puzzles. Play Boggle against yourself. Do online vocabulary games like "Guess My Word" or "Coverguess". Play Scrabble and Scattergories with anyone who will sit still long enough, and annoying rhyme-the-dialogue games with anyone who won't. Look up old Victorian wordplay parlor games like "I Love My Love With An A" or first letter-last letter word chains, and play them against yourself when you're lying awake in bed at night. Maybe the reason this doesn't get mentioned in a lot of writing advice is that for a long time the kind of people who moved in 'literary circles' did these kind of wordplay games in their leisure time just as second nature.
No-one ever becomes a great writer just from doing this kind of thing - any more than anyone ever became a great pianist just by playing scales - but the idea here is to stretch and exercise the parts of your brain that deal with words, and with language, to make it so that when you're sitting in front of the page going 'augh I know that word what is it why can't I think of it', you've trained the part of your mind that retrieves words from the database, and you actually can think of it. And when you have days where you want to write but you just can't words, word games and puzzles can be one way to wake up the language centers without having to stress about the rest of it, too.
(If you feel like you have a too-small vocabulary, vocabulary-building games are useful too - I have a massive vocabulary in terms of words I can define if they're put in front of me, but the proportion of those words I actually think of using when left to myself is minuscule, so I like the sort of games that force me to dredge up words I wouldn't normally find. Find games that exercise the parts of your language skills that you think need to be built on.)
And to go one step beyond that, write short silly pieces using arbitrary rules just to force yourself out of your language comfort zone. Do a thing that isn't using fifth sign from Anglo-Saxon script in any word. Write only five word sentences. Or two. Or something where every sentence has to start with a preposition. Or where every page is one multi-hundred-word sentence. Or write something with no adjectives, or no adverbs, or where all the verbs have to be verbed nouns. Alphabetical clauses, exercises in order with words. Write something in second-person-plural POV and future perfect continuous tense. Or do an exercise with no pronouns allowed at all. Forbid yourself any duplicated words at all, even 'the'. With only object-subject-verb word order, a thing you could write; endless, the possibilities are.
If you're comfortable with formal poetry, the more properly obscure poetic forms can be good for this, too - write sestinas and cinquains, write double dactyls and clerihews, spend a day writing everything you write in iambic pentameter or Beowulf-style alliterative verse.
The results of such exercises are quite likely to be terrible as pieces of writing, because all arbitrary grammar rules of that sort are often inimical to good fiction, but again, that's not the point - the point is to make yourself use language in ways you aren't already comfortable with, and to be playful with language, to learn how it works down in the mechanics by taking it apart and then deliberately putting it together again wrong, just to see what happens.
Again, this is something that won't necessarily lead to a presentable finished result, but in the same way that stupid language tricks get you looking at language on a vocab and grammar level in different ways, this is a way of making yourself look at the larger structural issues of story-craft - strategy vs. tactics, as it were - and play with them to see what you can make them do. In a way, this is the same sort of things that most of us learned to do in English classes, closely analyzing other people's writing, but (maybe especially) if you were burnt out and bitter from that, remember that when you do it as a writing exercise, you're doing it for a different purpose - you're looking at words, and saying "Can I make something that does that? Can I make something that sort of looks like that, but does something entirely different?". And then you're sitting down and actually seeing if you can.
Also, there's a lot of things that go into a story, even above the level of language - there's plot, theme, mood, voice, style, structure, pacing, characters, etc. - and what close pastiche can do is let you say, "Okay, I want to work on only mood today, so I am going to borrow this author's theme, voice, style, structure, pacing and characters, but play with the mood." And so on. Or the reverse - "I want to be able to do that kind of structure, but I don't know where to start with building it, so I am going to pull this great example of that kind of structure out of some other writer's work, but try to hang all sorts of different things off the same structure, so I can see how it works and learn the shape of it really well and find out what it will support and how much I can twist it before it stops working". (Or - tbh, is is far closer to my thought process - 'oh man I want to write about this but PLOT IS HARD okay okay I will just steal a plot from shakespeare/canon/folklore and then I won't have to worry about it anymore whew' - but the result of that is I can go out on a limb with things other than plot and really push myself there, and save working on plot for when I'm feeling more confident with the rest of it.)
Again, you see things that approach this a lot in collections of writing exercises, but often they spell it out for you - 'pick a style off this list and write is this style', 'use this structural formula that we will give you', etc. I actually find the more valuable part of the exercise is looking at the original and figuring out for yourself what you need to do to pastiche it, though, because what you think are the vital things that go into making the story what it is are going to be different from someone else's - three people mapping out the important story beats in a novel they want to pastiche should come up with slightly different answers, because if the novel's any good, they will be seeing different things as important. (This is where we hit a big difference from the analysis most people did in school, where you're expected to come up with the same basic answers as the rest of the class - that is important too, because learning those standard structures is how you learn to pick things apart - but as a writer, what you need to be looking for to pastiche is what's important to you, even if it means you're reading the story 'wrong'.)
I tend to do this - to the shock of nobody who's looked at my AO3 page - via crossovers; a lot of 'write one story to the tune of another', basically. Throw the wrong characters into the right plot, write a story about x canon in y canon's style, re-do X scene with different people saying the dialogue. I personally also find small fandom fic exchanges useful for this, because they give me a limited amount of time to really dig deeply into a story that I love that not a lot of people have looked at that way before, and then come up with something new that uses those same building-blocks - I think I've basically attempted close pastiche for every yuletide I've been in (which is every yuletide but one.) Another thing that can be fun for close pastiche is setting-swap AUs that try to stay close to canon despite changing all the context - learning the original well enough to figure out just how little you can get away with changing to make it still work. (These aren't necessarily the AUs that work best as stories, but they are good ones to write as exercises.)
I know. I know this sounds like every terrible indy comic ever about an angsty rich white boy who breaks up with his girlfriend because it'll be good for his art. But the problem there isn't that he's working on his art. The problem with that story is that he's an ASSHOLE who is working on his art. Just because angsty rich white boys in indy comics do it doesn't mean you aren't allowed to - it just means you should try very hard not to be an asshole about it. Also possibly that when you write your indy comic it should be about something other than how hard it is to be an angsty rich white boy with a comic, but that's getting off-topic.
...although not entirely. Because the other part of this is that when you get a chance at a new experience, you should take it, because the wider your experiences, the more you have to draw on in your writing. Try the disgusting-sounding food. Do the weekend trip you're not sure about. Listen with as much belief as you can manage to the homeless person who is telling you all about her mission from the Angels. When your extended family at the holiday dinner start going on about politics that make you want to puke, listen to them - not because you are interested in hearing about their politics, but because someday you will have to write a character who sincerely believes things that make you want to puke, and you're researching their thought processes.
When you have been doing up-close personal research on depression for long enough that you've probably got all the information you need, get up and go to the zoo. Not because going to the zoo will make you feel better, not because you will enjoy the trip - you probably won't, your brain probably thinks you need to research self-hatred alone in your room some more - but because a day at the zoo will let you observe all sorts of things that may be helpful in your writing. And you need to know what anhedonia at the zoo is like, because when you finally get around to writing that story with the depressed character in it, you can write a scene where they go to the zoo and are still depressed and it will be full of elegant symbolism and vivid descriptive passages, which you wouldn't have been able to write if you hadn't gone to the zoo today.
And if you're not currently being oppressed by brain chemistry, a day at the zoo (or beach, or park, or museum, or theater, or a night at the club, or an afternoon sorting your coin collection, or a miserable family dinner, or an ill-advised one-night stand) will still be sure to give you a lot of experiences that can later come out in your writing. Learn to look for them and treasure them and experience them as fully as you can. Doesn't mean you aren't also allowed to find experiences miserable first, doesn't mean you should make stupid decisions or do assholish things for your art, and doesn't mean you can't be a writer if your life is boring or your experiences are restricted by circumstances - 'write what you know' is horrible advice, but all the same, the more you can put of things you know vividly and personally into any story, the better it will be. I have never experienced zero-g, but I *did* ride the awful-looking elevator-drop ride at the fair, so I can write about the feeling of my stomach dropping out - and if I ever do get a chance at real zero-g, you can bet I'll take it. I've never been a farmer, but I know personally how it feels to plant a seed and watch with great hope to see if it grows - and part of being a writer is having the compassion and imagination to take those small pieces of experience, and use them to build a story about something much greater and just as true. The more pieces you have to work with, though, the better.
And if you're really lucky and good at hacking your own brain, eventually you might get to the point where you can come home after a miserable, exhausting, frustrating 18-hour day, flop back on your bed, close your eyes for five minutes, and then say 'well, at least I improved my writing today', and smile, and actually believe it.
Also, do crossword puzzles.
Anyway, I didn't speak up there because a) still refuse to discuss anything with any depth via tumblr sorry, and b) what I had to say is sort of orthogonal to the fascinating points they were making. But I have had "post about the stuff you do as writing exercise/practice/warmup" on my list for awhile, and I am fresh off a triumphant tenth massive failure at NaNo, so here is a list of five things I do as a writer that I do sort of think of as the equivalent of an artist doing drawing exercises or a musician doing scales or a boxer jumping rope, and that I think address, at least a little bit, the question from the tumblr thread of how you divide "write a thing" up into individual, simpler skills that can be practiced without having do everything at once.
Though first I should say that every brain works differently and every writer has a different way of working with words, so probably most of these will make no sense to most of you. Also, the first and always advice for being a better writer is the same advice for anybody trying to be better at any skill of any kind - do it a lot, do it with discipline, keep doing it. And read what other people are doing, too, read constantly.
The below are just things I have worked out as semi-effective substitutes for being disciplined and diligent, that I can do when I make time or in-betweens, because let's face it, disciplined and diligent is just not happening anytime soon for some of us, and they're things that work for me, more-or-less, or at least they feel like they work. But also, I think there's a tendency with beginning writers to steer them away from these kinds of exercises, because it is easy to fall into doing "writing exercises" instead of actually writing things. All the same, though, I think some of them can be very useful, as long as you keep in mind that they aren't a substitute for actually writing, so it seemed like they were worth sharing.
Also someone recently asked me how I managed to sit down two nights before an exchange fic was due with a blank page and end up with 7000 words of passable fiction by the deadline. My best answer was something like "Well, didn't write anything down until then, but I'd been working on writing it for months..." This is sort of the expanded version of that answer.
1. Write without writing anything down
Give yourself a specific time to think about what you are writing, without actually writing it. The one year I actually won NaNo, this is how I did it, and it's been a key part of my strategy the other times I've actually managed to be diligent about sticking with writing something on a daily basis. I think it's getting at what a lot of the writing advice books mean when they suggest "meditating" or "quiet time", but following that advice didn't work very well for me, because trying to quiet my mind is the opposite of what I need to do to before I write - I need to get it limber and focused.In terms of trying to separate the various skills that go into "writing" in order to practice them individually without having to juggle everything at once, one of the really basic skills that goes into writing is "thinking up the story". And you can do all the plotting worksheets and timelining and prompt generating you want, and that can help, but it can also end up as a way to not have to just get in there and practice thinking up your story. So I block out time for myself to just practice putting the story together in my head, without worrying about anything else.
Usually what I do is give myself a set period of time (10-15 minutes, usually, depending on how much time I have to work with?) and do something that uses enough of my brain that I don't get distracted, but doesn't used the parts of my brain that go into making stories - something that keeps me busy but doesn't engage my verbal brain, my creativity, or my critical thinking very much. My favorites are long walks, coloring books, and mindless puzzle games like Tetris or Bejeweled, but ymmv. And then I spend that time doing the mostly-mindless thing and thinking about what I want to be writing, without being allowed to actually write anything down.
Not being allowed to write anything down - not even notes - removes some of the pressure to come up with permanent answers and make everything work just right. The goal here is not to figure out exactly what you're going to write, it's not to come up with a finished outline or a complete scene, any more than the goal of the batter taking practice swings is to make the exact swing he will use later - the goal is to just move things around in my head until I have practiced shaping this story enough that when I do have a blank page in front of me, I am familiar enough with it that I can put the pieces of it together later without having to think through every step.
Obviously you can think about what you want to be writing without having a set-out time to do it, and if you are someone who writes you probably already spend a lot of time doing that whether you plan to or not, but I find the set-aside time helpful. Because it's harder than it seems to give myself permission to just sit and think about just writing and not anything else. And also, ramming it into my head that thinking about the stories I am working on counts as doing writing work and not just slacking off is I think one of the things that has helped me as a writer more than anything else I have learned about writing in the last ten years. Staring vaguely into the middle distance is part of the writer's craft; it isn't just hands-on-keyboard time that counts.
(When your being-a-writer time becomes 100% staring out window and 0% words on page it's a problem, yes. This is why I set a time limit when I'm doing it seriously. But even when it's 100% staring-out-window time and writing isn't happening, having beaten this into myself helps, because hating myself for not having hands on keyboard doesn't actually make it more likely to happen. And spending the time staring out the window - even when it's 15 weeks instead of 15 minutes - does make the writing happen better when it finally does happen.)
2. Do sketches from life
So this one is stolen wholesale from my occasional, even less disciplined attempts to Become An Artist, which is even harder than Be A Writer but the tutorials tend to be a lot better. But yes. The same way an artist takes a sketchbook out in the world and attempts to capture something around them in as few strokes as possible, a writer should occasionally take a notebook out in the world and attempt to capture something around them in as few strokes as possible.A place. A person. A thing. An event. A sensory experience. An emotional state. A conversation between passers-by. A movement. Anything real, that you can observe: sit and observe it, and then, while it's still present right there, capture it as best you can on the page. Like an artist's sketching from life, it will feel really hard if you've never done it before, and what you get on the page may not resemble the real thing, and you'll be tempted to spend way too much time on trying to get every sketch just right, but the more you do it, the more it becomes just a way of practicing, and the faster and more accurate you get, and the more you find yourself getting comfortable with your style instead of just aiming for accurate.
This is obviously partly about practice with writing descriptive passages, with learning what details are important and what order to go in and how much context to include and so on, but more than that, it's about building a repertoire of things you know how to write accurately - just like an artist doing life drawing learns basic anatomy until they can draw a person accurately without needing a model in front of them, a writer sketching people from life learns the basics of how people are put together, and from that can build better characters later. And similarly with working with emotions and places and so on - sketching from life teaches you how they're put together, and how to take them apart and rebuild them, much more vividly and creatively and accurately than any other way will teach you.
This is something else that I think I saw in various writing-advice places but never in a form that resonated with me: there would be individual exercises, 'describe a person you know', 'write x words about this photograph', or something, but I never made the connection that what I needed to do was not 'a writing exercise', it was to go out and sketch from life, the same way I do with my art. I feel like this is something the writer's art has lost - "Sketches" used to be a pretty common term for short, not-terribly-polished, semi-nonfictional vignettes, that might get published if the author came back and thought it was good, but then again, might never leave the sketchbook. It's also, I think, something that private journaling can approach, especially when it's journaling that's more outwardly focused, more about recording daily life than about analyzing experiences or working through them emotionally.
Also, if you're still intimidated by the blank sheet, or you find it hard to do rough sketches in a notebook without going overboard, this isn't necessarily even something you have to write; this practice is about learning how to transform real life into words, not about learning how to put words in fixed form, so while there's definitely value in doing it as a written exercise, there's also value in just doing it in your head - the next time you're standing in line or waiting for transportation, pick something or someone around you and think about how you would write about that if you put it in a story - try different things, play with it in your head. Do it until it becomes second nature.
3. Practice stupid language tricks
Play word games. Do language puzzles. Write things with gimmicky rules just to prove you can.This is something that, oddly, doesn't seem to get mentioned in a lot of 'how-to-write' sources, I guess because 'do crossword puzzles' doesn't sound like something a 'real writer' does. But yes. Do crossword puzzles. Play Boggle against yourself. Do online vocabulary games like "Guess My Word" or "Coverguess". Play Scrabble and Scattergories with anyone who will sit still long enough, and annoying rhyme-the-dialogue games with anyone who won't. Look up old Victorian wordplay parlor games like "I Love My Love With An A" or first letter-last letter word chains, and play them against yourself when you're lying awake in bed at night. Maybe the reason this doesn't get mentioned in a lot of writing advice is that for a long time the kind of people who moved in 'literary circles' did these kind of wordplay games in their leisure time just as second nature.
No-one ever becomes a great writer just from doing this kind of thing - any more than anyone ever became a great pianist just by playing scales - but the idea here is to stretch and exercise the parts of your brain that deal with words, and with language, to make it so that when you're sitting in front of the page going 'augh I know that word what is it why can't I think of it', you've trained the part of your mind that retrieves words from the database, and you actually can think of it. And when you have days where you want to write but you just can't words, word games and puzzles can be one way to wake up the language centers without having to stress about the rest of it, too.
(If you feel like you have a too-small vocabulary, vocabulary-building games are useful too - I have a massive vocabulary in terms of words I can define if they're put in front of me, but the proportion of those words I actually think of using when left to myself is minuscule, so I like the sort of games that force me to dredge up words I wouldn't normally find. Find games that exercise the parts of your language skills that you think need to be built on.)
And to go one step beyond that, write short silly pieces using arbitrary rules just to force yourself out of your language comfort zone. Do a thing that isn't using fifth sign from Anglo-Saxon script in any word. Write only five word sentences. Or two. Or something where every sentence has to start with a preposition. Or where every page is one multi-hundred-word sentence. Or write something with no adjectives, or no adverbs, or where all the verbs have to be verbed nouns. Alphabetical clauses, exercises in order with words. Write something in second-person-plural POV and future perfect continuous tense. Or do an exercise with no pronouns allowed at all. Forbid yourself any duplicated words at all, even 'the'. With only object-subject-verb word order, a thing you could write; endless, the possibilities are.
If you're comfortable with formal poetry, the more properly obscure poetic forms can be good for this, too - write sestinas and cinquains, write double dactyls and clerihews, spend a day writing everything you write in iambic pentameter or Beowulf-style alliterative verse.
The results of such exercises are quite likely to be terrible as pieces of writing, because all arbitrary grammar rules of that sort are often inimical to good fiction, but again, that's not the point - the point is to make yourself use language in ways you aren't already comfortable with, and to be playful with language, to learn how it works down in the mechanics by taking it apart and then deliberately putting it together again wrong, just to see what happens.
4. Pastiche
And by "pastiche" I don't mean "write fanfic" - not that there's anything wrong with fanfic, of course, but as we all know there are so many different ways to do fanfic. I mean close pastiche. I mean trying to write something that will pass as another author's style even under close inspection. I mean taking the entire first chapter of a book you love, and re-writing it with different characters or a different ending or a different setting, right down to paragraph-level correspondence. I mean looking at a story, or a video, scene-by-scene, chapter-by-chapter and writing a completely different story that follows exactly the same structure and story beats.Again, this is something that won't necessarily lead to a presentable finished result, but in the same way that stupid language tricks get you looking at language on a vocab and grammar level in different ways, this is a way of making yourself look at the larger structural issues of story-craft - strategy vs. tactics, as it were - and play with them to see what you can make them do. In a way, this is the same sort of things that most of us learned to do in English classes, closely analyzing other people's writing, but (maybe especially) if you were burnt out and bitter from that, remember that when you do it as a writing exercise, you're doing it for a different purpose - you're looking at words, and saying "Can I make something that does that? Can I make something that sort of looks like that, but does something entirely different?". And then you're sitting down and actually seeing if you can.
Also, there's a lot of things that go into a story, even above the level of language - there's plot, theme, mood, voice, style, structure, pacing, characters, etc. - and what close pastiche can do is let you say, "Okay, I want to work on only mood today, so I am going to borrow this author's theme, voice, style, structure, pacing and characters, but play with the mood." And so on. Or the reverse - "I want to be able to do that kind of structure, but I don't know where to start with building it, so I am going to pull this great example of that kind of structure out of some other writer's work, but try to hang all sorts of different things off the same structure, so I can see how it works and learn the shape of it really well and find out what it will support and how much I can twist it before it stops working". (Or - tbh, is is far closer to my thought process - 'oh man I want to write about this but PLOT IS HARD okay okay I will just steal a plot from shakespeare/canon/folklore and then I won't have to worry about it anymore whew' - but the result of that is I can go out on a limb with things other than plot and really push myself there, and save working on plot for when I'm feeling more confident with the rest of it.)
Again, you see things that approach this a lot in collections of writing exercises, but often they spell it out for you - 'pick a style off this list and write is this style', 'use this structural formula that we will give you', etc. I actually find the more valuable part of the exercise is looking at the original and figuring out for yourself what you need to do to pastiche it, though, because what you think are the vital things that go into making the story what it is are going to be different from someone else's - three people mapping out the important story beats in a novel they want to pastiche should come up with slightly different answers, because if the novel's any good, they will be seeing different things as important. (This is where we hit a big difference from the analysis most people did in school, where you're expected to come up with the same basic answers as the rest of the class - that is important too, because learning those standard structures is how you learn to pick things apart - but as a writer, what you need to be looking for to pastiche is what's important to you, even if it means you're reading the story 'wrong'.)
I tend to do this - to the shock of nobody who's looked at my AO3 page - via crossovers; a lot of 'write one story to the tune of another', basically. Throw the wrong characters into the right plot, write a story about x canon in y canon's style, re-do X scene with different people saying the dialogue. I personally also find small fandom fic exchanges useful for this, because they give me a limited amount of time to really dig deeply into a story that I love that not a lot of people have looked at that way before, and then come up with something new that uses those same building-blocks - I think I've basically attempted close pastiche for every yuletide I've been in (which is every yuletide but one.) Another thing that can be fun for close pastiche is setting-swap AUs that try to stay close to canon despite changing all the context - learning the original well enough to figure out just how little you can get away with changing to make it still work. (These aren't necessarily the AUs that work best as stories, but they are good ones to write as exercises.)
5. Do stuff. Try things.
....which is possibly the least helpful writing advice ever. :P But. Everything in a writer's experience and knowledge is stuff that will later be useful for their writing. When I'm feeling like I just can't do this and will always be failure as a writer, I go fly a kite in the vacant lot, and then I think "this was a great experience - the sky was blue, the wind was crisp, the color of the kite was just right for the quality of the air, also I am terrible at flying kites and I only just barely got it to fly - and because I'm a writer too, I can keep this experience with me, and later share it with other people by writing about it." Going out to dinner with friends when you can't afford it? Useful material for writing. Painting a thing when you are terrible at painting and it looks like a three-year-old did it? Useful for writing. Waiting for the bus in the rain? Useful for writing. Had a humiliating emotional breakdown at work? USEFUL FOR WRITING. Spent the entire day sprawled limply in bed stewing in your own juices of self-hatred? USEFUL FOR WRITING DAMMIT ONE DAY YOU WILL WRITE ABOUT A CHARACTER WHO IS DEPRESSED AND BECAUSE OF TODAY YOUR WRITING WILL SHINE. Just not today because you're too busy doing important personal-experience research into depression.I know. I know this sounds like every terrible indy comic ever about an angsty rich white boy who breaks up with his girlfriend because it'll be good for his art. But the problem there isn't that he's working on his art. The problem with that story is that he's an ASSHOLE who is working on his art. Just because angsty rich white boys in indy comics do it doesn't mean you aren't allowed to - it just means you should try very hard not to be an asshole about it. Also possibly that when you write your indy comic it should be about something other than how hard it is to be an angsty rich white boy with a comic, but that's getting off-topic.
...although not entirely. Because the other part of this is that when you get a chance at a new experience, you should take it, because the wider your experiences, the more you have to draw on in your writing. Try the disgusting-sounding food. Do the weekend trip you're not sure about. Listen with as much belief as you can manage to the homeless person who is telling you all about her mission from the Angels. When your extended family at the holiday dinner start going on about politics that make you want to puke, listen to them - not because you are interested in hearing about their politics, but because someday you will have to write a character who sincerely believes things that make you want to puke, and you're researching their thought processes.
When you have been doing up-close personal research on depression for long enough that you've probably got all the information you need, get up and go to the zoo. Not because going to the zoo will make you feel better, not because you will enjoy the trip - you probably won't, your brain probably thinks you need to research self-hatred alone in your room some more - but because a day at the zoo will let you observe all sorts of things that may be helpful in your writing. And you need to know what anhedonia at the zoo is like, because when you finally get around to writing that story with the depressed character in it, you can write a scene where they go to the zoo and are still depressed and it will be full of elegant symbolism and vivid descriptive passages, which you wouldn't have been able to write if you hadn't gone to the zoo today.
And if you're not currently being oppressed by brain chemistry, a day at the zoo (or beach, or park, or museum, or theater, or a night at the club, or an afternoon sorting your coin collection, or a miserable family dinner, or an ill-advised one-night stand) will still be sure to give you a lot of experiences that can later come out in your writing. Learn to look for them and treasure them and experience them as fully as you can. Doesn't mean you aren't also allowed to find experiences miserable first, doesn't mean you should make stupid decisions or do assholish things for your art, and doesn't mean you can't be a writer if your life is boring or your experiences are restricted by circumstances - 'write what you know' is horrible advice, but all the same, the more you can put of things you know vividly and personally into any story, the better it will be. I have never experienced zero-g, but I *did* ride the awful-looking elevator-drop ride at the fair, so I can write about the feeling of my stomach dropping out - and if I ever do get a chance at real zero-g, you can bet I'll take it. I've never been a farmer, but I know personally how it feels to plant a seed and watch with great hope to see if it grows - and part of being a writer is having the compassion and imagination to take those small pieces of experience, and use them to build a story about something much greater and just as true. The more pieces you have to work with, though, the better.
And if you're really lucky and good at hacking your own brain, eventually you might get to the point where you can come home after a miserable, exhausting, frustrating 18-hour day, flop back on your bed, close your eyes for five minutes, and then say 'well, at least I improved my writing today', and smile, and actually believe it.
Also, do crossword puzzles.