Express Media – We're here for young writers

Take a piece of paper and write ten sentences that each start with the words ‘Your mother’. The sentences don’t have to be related or connected to each other. Try to write quickly, writing the first things that come to your mind. You should now have ten sentences that start with Your mother. If you like, choose one of those sentences and keep writing for about ten minutes. See what you get. This exercise is good because the words Your mother have a lot in them. They set up three characters essentially, the narrator which is the ‘I’, another person which is the ‘you’ and of course, their mother. And mothers are typically an interesting subject, and if you are saying something about someone else’s mother then there is a wealth of potential for conflict, tension or humour there.

For this exercise you need paper, a pen and a timer. There is one here (http://www.online-stopwatch.com/full-screen-stopwatch/) online if you need it. Set the timer to countdown ten minutes. Now grab the book that is nearest to you. It needs to be a book, not a brochure or a magazine or a paper. A real, honest-to-goodness book. But it doesn’t matter which book. Open it at page thirty-six and count seven lines down. Write this seventh line down on your piece of paper. Start writing. If you get stuck, rewrite the line from page 36. Write it over and over if you have to until something else comes out of the pen. Trust me, something else will come. Don’t stop writing for the whole ten minutes, don’t reread or edit or censor yourself. Just keep going. Stop at the end of ten minutes and see what you’ve got. This exercise is good for getting started in a writing session, getting some words down on the page, but with a little help from another writer. It can be hard getting started, getting your writing muscles going. This helps. Do it more than once, using different books and different page and line numbers. Do it with a newspaper or a magazine. Change it up!

For this exercise you need some tear-up-able paper and a pen. Take your paper and tear it into 6 pieces, each big enough to write a couple of words on. Also this random word generator makes this exercise all the more random. Take three of your pieces of paper and write a noun on each. That could be any kind of noun, concrete noun, abstract noun, common noun. Noun away! So for example, I might write: Belonging Flame Apple Then take your remaining three pieces of paper and write three adjectives. Describing words. For example: Derogatory Shining Powerful Now put them together so you have three phrases. I got: Powerful Belonging Shining Apple Derogatory Flame Hmm.. Now choose a phrase and write from it for 10 minutes. Set that timer! See what you get, take it any way it goes. You don't even have to use that specific phrase if you don't want to. This exercise can be great for making great connections and images appear.

Time to get your pens out and write something over the weekend! Thanks so much to the guys who tried last week's exercise and posted it on the blog. Don't forget, these exercises are designed to challenge and push you, to inspire you and to get something started. If you find a spark or even just a sentence or a phrase you like - take it and run with it! Shape it into something and then submit to the magazine. In this week's exercise you need to choose two characters and a setting. Try and think of something specific, but not too specific. You want to challenge yourself but leave yourself open to something unexpected too! Once you've chosen your characters and setting, follow this list of sentences to write - you must mention the thing or write the sentence the way the list tells you. 1. A book. 2. The weather. 3.  A sound. 4. A piece of dialogue with more than 10 words. 5. An animal. 6. A current event. 7. A piece of dialogue that is a question. 8. A texture. 9. The ceiling or the floor or the ground. 10. A piece of dialogue with less than 6 words. So you should end up with a paragraph that is 10 sentences long, and the first sentence will mention or have something to do with a book and the second will mention or have something to do with the weather and so on. Make sense? Yes? Then go forth and write!

Each Friday we will endeavor to post a short creative writing exercise on the blog. The purpose of which is so you, dearest reader, can take the exercise, work on it over the weekend and then let us know how you went! These exercises are meant to challenge your writerly talents, provide you with space to write new and different stuff but most of all they are meant to be fun. Words are there to be played with! And play is such an important thing in life. So. Your job? Take the exercise that is posted and try hard at it. See where it takes you. Then if you are brave enough, comment here with what you've created, or a short excerpt of it. We want to see what is possible and how different exercises take people in different places! Today's exercise is one that I use in pretty much every workshop I do, because it's a great easy one to start off with. Take the following sentence and make it into a paragraph. Do this by using each word as the beginning word of a sentence. 'Two days ago, Melbourne gangland figure Carl Williams was beaten to death.' So your paragraph should start with a sentence beginning with the word 'Two' and the second sentence should begin with the word 'days' and so on.  You should end up with a paragraph that is 12 sentences long. There are no rules about what the paragraph should be about, it could be about Carl Williams or about jellyfish or about your neighbour's dead dog. BUT you can't change the words or the order. The paragraph could be a coherent (or semi-coherent) narrative or it might not be. It's up to you. Go on. I dare you.