Five Powerful & Precise Writing Exercises for the First Week of the New Year & One for Every Day

Who wants to write not just more, but better, in the year ahead? That’s what this post is for—it contains a set of five structured writing exercises and one daily practice that can, taken cumulatively, transform your writing over time. These exercises involve several of the skills and devices I wrote about in Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Learned From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts, especially the crucial task of discerning internal from external narration.

We know beautiful writing is made by placing words one after the other in a specific order for a specific reason. Yes, marvelous accidents do sometimes result in words tumbling randomly onto the page in spontaneous, breathtakingly perfect arrangement. But I don’t expect that kind of accident. Instead, I see writing as a skill to be learned and practiced. Powerful writing wakes readers up, makes them feel something. The writing I love best utterly devastates me. But how does it do that? That is what I am always seeking …