Freddy Words

Exercises based on “Writing Picture Books” by Ann Whitford Paul. I have modified  the exercises for more general writing, but there is still a heavy slant towards fiction.

Step 1: Write an Opening

Roughly 250-500 words.  I want to call this a paragraph, but I’ve seen opening paragraphs that are only one word long.  You need a little bit of meat to be able to do these exercises. You will be using this for all the exercises, so try not to write something that will annoy you.

Step Two: Point of View

Rewrite your Opening in at least 2 different POV:

a. Third Person, single POV
b. Third Person, different POV Character
c. Narrative Voice, multiple POV
d. First Person
e. First Person, different character
f. First Person, like a letter
g. First Person, like a diary
h. Second Person

Step Three: Setting

Rewrite your Opening

a. Change the time
b. Change the location
c. Change to verb tense
d. Change the characters (People to animals, animals to aliens, Fantasy to Sci fi)

Step Four: Tone

Rewrite your Opening at lease twice using a different tone

a. Funny
b. Scary
c. Epic
d. Romance
e. Thriller
f. Mystery

Step Five: Character Study

For each character, decide the following:

a. Name
b. Age
c. Appearance
d. Relationships
e. Personality

Bonus:
f. What has brought the character to this point in the start of the story?
g. What does the character want?

Step Six: Strong Opening

I like this step, it uses colours!

Print out your Opening and mark it up with the following colours:

a. RED – Who is the main character?
b. YELLOW – What does the main character want?
c. GREEN – When is the story taking place?
d. BLUE – Where is the story taking place?
e. PURPLE – What is the tone of the story?

BONUS STEP: Poetry!

Rewrite your Opening as a poem.  (or at least pump up the poetical phrasing)

a. Rhythm
b. Rhyme
c. Alliteration
d. Assonance, consonance
e. Onomatopoeia

Have Fun!

Susan

Eleven people attended the dialogue workshop today at Trinitea’s/Officer’s Square. I think that it went very well, but one thing that I didn’t get to talk about was this list of exercises I found, mostly because I thought it would be really uncomfortable for everyone to sit in silence and listen to me read it all off word-for-word. Instead, I’ll post the link here for anyone who’s interested.

http://www.poewar.com/12-exercises-for-improving-dialogue/

Thanks for coming, everyone.

I have started my rough draft of the really long sentence, and I am having a lot of fun writing it.  I am keeping my topic a secret for now, it will be revealed at the meeting, so I hope I can make it.

Is anyone else making progress at the really long sentence?