Realms of the Raven

I've attended a lot of classes and seen a lot of books where writers are told that they should do periodic "writing exercises". These are often set up using a line or a picture and the writer doing the exercise is told to write based on these.

It's truly amazing and amusing to see what emerges when a set of different people, even those who all write in the same genre, are given the same starting point.

I've recently realized that I both enjoy and am good at these sorts of "author improv" tasks. It's one of the few, if not the only, ones I like. Forget the round robin intros, forget the running monologues about why you want to write. I'm naturally fairly shy so those do nothing but scare me to death :)

Given the incentive, however, my muse loves to create backstory and circumstances to encompass just about any inspriation. Especially, it seeems, if I really SHOULD be writing something else.

But I've actually found these exercises have unexpected benefits and I now never throw away the results. More than once these have become stories all their own.

I'd heard other people espouse the value of these "writing exercises" and now you can sign me up as a believer!