Writing Doodles 2 (Writing Practice)

If you are an artist, you will doodle, do figure studies, or experiment with your color palette to practice. If you are a pianist, you have finger exercises or scales to practice! But as a writer you might think, “The more I write equals the more I practice.” That is true, but do you have any small exercises to complete? Instead of just writing randomly, there are many silly exercises you can do to exercise certain parts of your mind and the writing process. For fun, here are some ways you can practice writing. Think about it like doodling!

Practice Your Vocabulary

When I was in high school, I always had vocabulary tests. In college, I was exposed to so much literature and was learning new words every day. Now? It’s important to touch up on what I know.

Let’s play another ABC game. Go through the alphabet and write out ten words you know per letter. The words can be simple or complex—it’s up to you! Make it challenging and write 40 words per letter if you want.

Why? This gets you thinking and who knows what old words you may stir up from your memory.

I don’t want to take up too much space, so I’ll do three words each.

A: assuage, attempt, annex

B: bile, babbling, booster

C: corrupt, capricious, Capricorn

D: denial, delta, demographic

E: exceptional, elephant, epiphany

F: frankincense, father, future

G: giraffe, goalie, gathered

H: hectare, hieroglyph, hike

I: idiolectic, icicles, ideology

J: January, joker, jabberwocky

K: kaleidoscope, kale, kiss

L: league, legend, lethargic

M: magnificent, marble, memory

N: nuance, notation, null

O: opulent, oxymoron, onomatopoeia

P: parallelogram, prediction, peroxide

Q: queen, queer, quotient

R: rally, radiant, radical

S: sophisticated, sullied, sheer

T: triumphant, tactical, training

U: unilateral, unbiased, unicorn

V: viral, voyage, visceral

W: wild, wonderful, willing

X: xylophone, x-ray, xenia

Y: youngling, yellow, yesterday

Z: zipper, zebra, zygote

This just gets your mind moving. For fun, here are twenty words for the letter “A.”

Accept, ascend, accentuate, adventure, assuage, announce, annual, anaphylactic, amphibian, aquiline, annihilation, anniversary, apprehensive, approbate, appropriate, approach, ascension, ascertain, attention, acquiescent.

If you want a challenge, list only verbs or go through the alphabet using only adjectives!

Tenses & Points of View

Take a paragraph from a book or in your own writing and rewrite it in a different tense or point of view for practice. The tense and point of view you choose for a story should be deliberate. There are benefits and drawbacks for each one so be sure to consider how you want to tell your story. I recommend never picking randomly. This is great practice just to see how different it feels between each kind.

For review:

1st person point-of-view: “I do this.”

2nd person point-of-view: (Usually used in non-fiction/ instructional pieces) “You do this.”

3rd person point-of-view: “she/he/they do this.”

Past Tense: “I did this,” or “She ran.”

Present Tense: “I do this,” or “She runs.”

As an example, here is a paragraph in the first chapter of my fiction commission, Rayla’s Journey: A Skyrim Fanfiction.

The story is originally in third person present tense:

“‘It shouldn’t be this way,” Meredith says. Rayla’s mother has argued against this trip for months, going to great lengths to convince Rayla to stay. ‘I don’t know what convinced my sister to ever leave this island. She should have been perfectly happy here. And she sends you these letters? Enticing you away from us?’ Meredith wraps her arms around herself and takes a deep breath. Rayla, an ache rising in her chest, steps forward and pulls her mother close.” (Note: because I put the whole paragraph in quotes, the dialogue quotes change to single ‘’ accents.)

Let’s make that in first person past tense:

“‘It shouldn’t be this way,” Meredith said. My mother had argued against my trip for months, going to great lengths to convince me to stay. ‘I don’t know what convinced my sister to ever leave this island. She should have been perfectly happy here. And she sends you these letters? Enticing you away from us?’ Meredith wrapped her arms around herself and took a deep breath. With an ache raising in my chest, I stepped forward and pull mother close.”

Now, I recommend picking up a book and picking out a random paragraph! Try this yourself and pick the opposite of what is in the book.

Dictionary Practice

Here is another fun way to practice and learn new words at the same time. I recommend picking up a dictionary and picking out three random words. Next, try to write a coherent sentence with those words!

Here are mine (thanks to dictionary.com’s random word list.)

Canary: a bird native to the Canary Islands, domesticated varieties are yellow where they are green and brown in the wild.

Postgraduate: post-graduates, adjective.

Anadromous: Fish that migrate to fresh water from salt water to spawn.

My sentence: The yellow canary, a postgraduate of the forest’s Animal Biology program with a specialty in aquatics, sits on a branch and watches the anadromous salmon travel upstream.

…I feel like that can be a story already!

Let’s try again:

Subsolar: to be situated beneath the sun or between the sun and earth.

Scenography: the art of representing objects to the rules of perspective.

Clinch: to settle a matter decisively.

My sentence: I will clinch my transgressions and will win this photography contest with my mastery of subsolar scenography!

I don’t know if that makes sense…

Conclusion

These were just a few more ways to practice writing. It’s fun to doodle these exercises to get yourself thinking and do something different than normal. If you are looking for more fun ways to practice, check out my earlier post, “Doodling as a Writer” and be on the look out for future doodling articles! Be sure to share in the comments below your attempts at these practices. I look forward to seeing what you all come up with!