Warming up your writing skills
If you’re an athlete, or someone who goes to the gym, you might notice that when you stop for awhile and start again that first time back you feel a bit rusty. Or if you are a musician and you skip practicing for a couple of weeks, that first time you sit down to the piano, your playing might be kind of stiff. Sound familiar? The same thing happens with writing.
If you’ve spent the summer working, traveling, having fun (I hope) — you probably didn’t spend a lot of time writing. And now you’re going to go back to school, back to writing essays, reports and research papers. It’s a great idea to start writing now, so that when you get that first essay assignment in a couple weeks, you aren’t struck with paralyzing writer’s block!
How do you warm up? Here are a few ideas:
1. Keep a sketchbook.
Just start taking notes every day about the things that you see. Try to capture the world in all of its color and detail in words, the way an artist makes sketches. Maybe you’re still on vacation. Describe the tourist with ice cream on his chin, his corduroy shorts drooping from a too-loose belt, as he feeds the seagulls with one hand and chews his crumbling ice cream cone with another. Describe the lost red Converse on the beach, its laces tangled in seaweed, the faint scribble of someone’s name and a heart on the sole. Anything is interesting if you pay attention to it. This kind of “warming up” will help you to remember to use details in your writing.
2. Have an opinion!
Scan the news, scan Facebook, or Twitter or Pinterest for some article that makes you mad, piques your interest, or your passion. Maybe you’re interested in a particular environmental issue, maybe you’re irritated by a pop star’s comment on what it means to be a woman, maybe you want to take on something one of the presidential candidates said… Write an opinion piece, your own response to the issue. Use stories from your life or the lives of people you know as concrete evidence. Here are some examples of opinion pieces you can model your writing after. This is an exercise in organizing your thoughts, and also gives you some room to vent. But remember: you aren’t just venting, you are trying to persuade an audience to agree with you. So don’t forget to think about your audience! (This means, among other things, practice writing grammatically correct sentences! And using details that will engage readers.)
3. Tell a story. Take something that happened to you this summer and give it to another character: someone who is a different age, gender, maybe even lives on a different planet. Change at least 7 things about this character to make this person decidedly not you. Writing fiction is a matter of stepping into someone else’s shoes, but writing about universal experiences, universal feelings. This exercise will help you practice creativity and writing with details.
Happy writing!
-Aurora