Could you write a short detective story in the style of Austen? A horror story in the style of Wodehouse? A romantic comedy in the style of Woolf? You can surely think of combinations of your own. You’d need to take an author with a very distinctive style – such as Virginia Woolf, PG Wodehouse or Jane Austen – and write about a completely different topic to their preferred subject. One idea that’s a popular exercise among creative writing classes is to write in the style of a famous author, but choose a different topic. If coming up with ideas or tackling a blank page don’t bother you, perhaps you’re interested in trying out a challenge that will stretch your technical skills as well as your creative flair. Write in the style of a famous author but on a different topic Once you’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks, you’ll notice that you’re starting to see the world a little differently – you’ll be looking for inspiration for the day’s microfiction wherever you go, and hopefully you’ll be finding it too. The content doesn’t really matter it’s the exercise of trying to come up with something new daily that really counts. You might decide to fictionalise a brief encounter you observed between friends at the lockers in school, or rewrite a fairytale, or see if you can compose a Shakespearean sonnet. So what might your new idea each day be? That’s up to you. If you write microfiction, you don’t have this option. In some ways, this is harder than NaNoWriMo’s punishing word count in NaNoWriMo you don’t have to come up with a fresh idea each day, but instead you can just pick up where you left off. It might be only be a couple of hundred words long – or even less – but the challenge here is to create something regularly that stands on its own. Task yourself with writing something that forms a complete whole every day (or every week, if daily is unmanageable). One way of practising your writing that’s also much more sustainable long-term is to write a daily piece of microfiction. If you can’t imagine that you’d ever have time to write 2,000 words in any given day, don’t worry. And even if most of what you write is dreadful, chances are one or two good passages will sneak in there somewhere. It’ll give you a sense of word count, and just what you can do with those 2,000 words allotted to you every day. It may cure any fears you have of facing an empty page. Instead, it gets you into the habit of writing regularly. You might not think it’s worth bothering if you aren’t even going to write anything good, but that’s not the point of NaNoWriMo. More often, in fact, writers resort to lengthy dream sequences, elaborate descriptions of extraneous details, very long conversations of little significance, and various other devices to eke every little bit of word count out of their plots as they possibly can – up to and including characters with very long names who refuse to be referred to by any abbreviated version. Writing approximately 2,000 words every day doesn’t usually result in good prose. NaNoWriMo novels are seldom good (though there are some exceptions – a few, heavily edited, have made it into publication). It’s worth noting that if you have a brilliant idea for what may well become the defining novel of the 21st century, NaNoWriMo is probably not the occasion to write it. There’s no reward if you win, except the satisfaction of having written a novel, and adulation among the large online community of writers who gather every year to take part. It’s a challenge to write a 50,000-word novel – so about the length of Of Mice And Men – in thirty days. Try the challenge of National Novel Writing MonthĮvery November, tens of thousands of people across the world take part in the National Novel Writing Month – usually shortened to NaNoWriMo. That’s why, in this article, we’ve taken a look at some fun and interesting creative writing challenges that will put your abilities to the test, and maybe help you develop as a writer at the same time. It’s all very well to decide to challenge yourself, but sitting down in front of your laptop – or notepad, if you’re a traditionalist – and expecting a challenge to emerge can be a little optimistic.
And writing the same things in the same style and the same genre that you always do will only get you so far trying something challenging, rather than something comfortable, is the best way to make progress.īut trying to figure out what form that challenge might be can be trickier. Like any skill from playing the violin to running marathons, the more time you put into practising your writing, the better it will become. Then you probably already know that the key to scintillating dialogue, brilliant prose and beautiful poetry is many long hours of practice. Do you want to hone your creative writing skills?
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