A blank page is also a door — it contains infinity, like a night sky with a supermoon really close to the Earth, with all the stars and the galaxies, where you can see very, very clearly… You know how that makes your heart beat faster?

– David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

Sure, David Mitchell. But not all of us see that blank page as a land of opportunity. Even the most imaginative, prolific writers will have a moment when they start to question whether they have anything worth saying.  

So, let’s set a couple of ground rules.

First: you have plenty of material. That was the premise of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. Just by living, thinking and interacting, you’re equipped with a dense network of things to write about. If you don’t believe me (or Knausgaard), maybe you’ll trust Walt Whitman. He wrote a poem on the subject, titled ‘There was a child went forth every day.’ The moral of the tale is that you don’t need to do much more than step outside the door. Your brain will do the rest. The important thing is to return to your desk daily to harvest the material. 

Second: lower the stakes. To borrow a phrase from the artist William Kentridge, the writing desk is a “safe space for stupidity.” Kentridge also argues that we shouldn’t worry about starting from a place of insincerity. You cannot write well until you allow yourself to write terribly. The good writers are simply those who stuck it out—who trusted that the drivel would eventually be distilled, and they’d be left with a lump of solid gold.

And now, for those exercises…

Lovely lists

The cure for writing a little is writing a lot. Start with a list.

When the writer Ray Bradbury was in his twenties, he developed an unusual technique inspired by the sight of a humble shopping list. He’d start by writing a list of nouns—any that came to mind. 

THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

And so on. It’s important to note that the list was not the masterpiece itself, but the can opener which opened a can of worms. It was ok if the list was silly or derivative because, as Bradbury explained:

“These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.” 

So, go open that trapdoor.

Instagram it

Social media isn’t always a distraction. Use (with caution!) to help you source your next story.

Depending on your degree of willpower, you may want to make a pact with yourself to limit the time spent browsing images. But, disclaimer aside, jump on Instagram now and choose three intriguing images. These images will form the beginning, the middle and the end of your story. 

Start by describing what you see in the first image. What kind of characters would inhabit that scene? Why are they there? What are they afraid of? What are they looking forward to? How do they feel about one another? Once you’ve answered these questions, see if you can connect the scene to the second image—or, you might find that your story is already taking you in another direction…

Organ voluntary

When in doubt, listen to your body.

When you’re staring at that blank page, it can be hard to hear anything but the blood rushing in your ears. Or perhaps the sound of your headphones pounding to fill the silence. But while you wait for the muse to whisper in your ear, ask your body what it has to say. Choose an organ, any organ. Ask it how it feels living inside your body? Is it happy? Does it have any complaints? Would it prefer to be in a different body? Transcribe everything the organ says, word for word. 

Take a hike

The tried and tested method favored by the likes of Henry David Thoreau, Charles Baudelaire and Virginia Woolf.

Forget writing for the moment. Open the door, put one foot in front of the other, and repeat. Keep going. And every now and then, make a note of what you see. When you come back from your walk, gather those notes together and choose a particular observation that strikes you. Start by describing what you saw—an ice cream cone splattered on the pavement, a bird’s nest delicately balanced in a tree. What associations are prompted by this image? What does it make you think about the surrounding area, and your role as a walker? What does your observation say about you?

Found poetry

Good poets borrow, great poets steal.

Sure. But they add a transformative touch of their own imagination. This exercise involves using a pre-existing text to generate your own. 

Choose a book of prose, preferably one full of dense, interesting language—I’m thinking a Russian novel, or a book packed with neologisms like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Open at any page, and pick out the words or phrases that stand out to you. Now, choose a theme. What is it that you want to express—feelings of love, sadness, frustration, uncertainty? Write the words down on a piece of paper and cut them into word tiles. 

Now arrange the word tiles on a piece of paper, adding text in between to fill the gaps. So, the words EEL and HELLBENT might generate a phrase like: ‘Oh eel of my heart, hellbent on slimy knees’. Etc. 

A better yesterday

Another take on everyday experience.

What did you do yesterday? Is it worth writing about? If your answer is “yes,” great. If not, then try this. Imagine if your day yesterday was experienced by a character from one of your favorite books—or even a movie or video game. How would they have experienced the day, and what would happen next?

The uninvited

An exercise to practice generating tension.

No party is complete without a wicked fairy godmother. Imagine a scene at a party. Who’s there, where is it, what are people wearing? Who’s the host, and what is the premise of the party? Now—a knock at the door. Who’s there? Who would be the least welcome individual to arrive at this particular moment? Why? Who will open the door? What will happen next?

N + 7

A creative equation from ‘the workshop of potential literature’: a 1960s experiment.

Here’s another found poetry technique, borrowed from those masters of the bizarre, Oulipo—a group of French speaking writers and mathematicians who believed that rules and constraints allow for creative freedom.

This technique involves taking a pre-existing poem, and substituting each noun with the one that occurs seven nouns away in the dictionary. OK, just read that twice. 

If you don’t have a dictionary (dictionaries are now an endangered species), then use this online N + 7 generator. You can play strictly by the rules, or choose any alternative word of the same letter. So, if I’m hungry, the line “glazed with rain” in William Carlos Williams’ ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ might become “glazed with raisins.” All of a sudden, it’s a poem about a cinnamon roll. 

The prophet on aisle 3

A paradox to prompt a short story.

Imagine this. A prophet knows the exact time, date and circumstances of his death. He knows he will die of a heart attack, stretching to reach a can of beans on aisle 3 of his local supermarket. The problem is, for various reasons (tenure, tax reasons, an ailing mother), the prophet is obliged to stay in his hometown—and visit the supermarket whenever he is in need of groceries. How does he feel each time he enters through the automatic doors and under the CCTV cameras? How do his shopping habits change over time? Does he try to subvert his fate?

Read all about it

Do as the screenwriters do—cut out stories from the local paper.

Any writer worth their salt knows that reality is stranger than fiction. Your local paper—the one that usually ends up mouldering outside your door—is a treasure trove of premises. The filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is a fan of this technique, as was Charles Dickens. But if you’re more of a digital native, you might prefer sourcing your material from a curated newsletter—I recommend The Public Domain Review, JSTOR Daily and Brain Pickings.

Oh ugly

A delightful exercise inspired by ugliness.

After a while, poets tire of writing about beauty. A good example is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130—it was clearly much more fun to write about ugliness. Think of something fairly repulsive you’ve seen, and describe it in detail. This exercise works best when you have some sympathy for the thing described. Can you write a beautiful poem or passage of prose inspired by ugliness? 

Open house

An exercise to help you establish the structure of your story.

The French have a phrase for the impulse to fill an awkward silence: “meubler le silence,” which essentially means to fill an empty space with furniture. 

If you have an idea for a story or you want to write a memoir piece, think about how you might construct the text like a house for the reader to walk through. It’s essentially a way of making sure that you are keeping the reader in mind, and remembering that they are entering blind. Where would be the most logical place to locate the front door? What do they need to know when they enter the hall? How should they exit each room? Sarah Broom, author of the memoir The Yellow House, is a fan of this technique. “I saw the book as another kind of house,” she writes. “How did I want the reader to pass through it? What room would they enter first, and how should that room feel?”

Up in the old hotel

Magic happens when you bring people together.

Writers like Joseph Mitchell and Thomas Mann realized that hotels and hospitals offered the perfect premise for a story. Identify a location where many different types of people come together by chance—that might be a shopping mall, a metro station, a laundromat or a down-at-heel beauty parlor. Who are the regulars? Why do they come here? Who’s just passing through? How do these different characters relate to one another? What are they searching for?

The long view

Switch up your point of view.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling completely differently about a place when you see it from the window of a plane? An alternative perspective can provide new insights and questions, breathing life back into old subject matter. 

Try writing a poem about a familiar object or place, but imagine seeing your subject from the sky. How does it look from above? What can we learn from the birds?

All grown up

Imagine the later lives of your favorite children’s book characters. 

Remember the books you read as a child? Those were the stories that set the tone for your later life as a writer. But what have the characters been doing all this time? Where do they live now? Are they married, do they have pets? What is their taste in interior design? Have they done something terrible? Have they kept their childhood dreams?

One small step

Collecting moon litter to make literature.

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing by NASA’s Apollo 11. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left behind a series of footprints and an American flag—and about 100 other objects. Browse the online list (which includes a pair of space boots and a urine collection pot) and consider what confused moon beings might make of them. What could these objects be used for? How might they be interpreted?

Swan songs

Poems in praise of endangered animals.

The UN recently reported that one million species are at risk of extinction. Take a look at this slideshow compiled by National Geographic. What words would you use to describe the Bornean orangutan? What about the hawksbill sea turtle? Have you ever written a poem about a giant panda? Now is the time.

Use any one of these exercises to fuel you during your next writing session. Whether you’re artistically blocked and looking for inspiration, or just seeking a way to break the monotony of working on your latest manuscript, any of these exercises could provide that needed dose of inspiration.