I wish I could remember that writing exercises are a good thing, and not meant as some kind of punishment. Maybe then I’d do them on a regular basis, even if I dragged my feet every step of the way.

My muse doesn’t care for such preambles; she finds writing exercises a bore, and a waste of time. But I’m beginning to suspect that her impulsive nature is exactly why my creativity is in need of a warm up. I love spontaneity in writing, it’s what makes the act of creative writing so satisfying and fun. But if I haven’t first warmed up my writing muscles, I’m left with writing with no depth because I followed with glee the sparkle and glimmer of my muse’s colorful meanderings, only to discover she’d left me right smack in the middle of a troublesome description, or a clever bit of dialogue.

My last blog post included an objective correlative writing exercise. Today’s exercise is a bit simpler: look around you at your surroundings, and pick one thing to write about in three sentences. It might be a framed painting hanging on your wall, a pile of dirty clothes on the floor or your fat cat snoozing at the foot of your bed, or the arm of your couch. Say what comes to mind first about your subject, in three sentences. That’s it. You’re not going for spectacular writing here, all you’re doing is warming up your creativity. Here’s a few of my own little word doodles as a sample. As you can see, these are plain little word pictures, nothing more:

Cat

Curl up like a fur ball,

your boneless fluff

a rug for my feet.

Metal Chair

Who needs this reminder

of school assemblies:

cold metal on tender bottoms?

Purse

When I was little,

joy was digging through a grownup’s purse,

sifting its contents for clues to my own femaleness.

Socks

How can I take you seriously

when one of you

is forever losing its mate?

You get the idea. There is nothing daunting here, you can even do these while drinking your first cup of coffee of the day. In fact, I find I do much better when my conscious mind isn’t fully awake, for that means my muse is off somewhere (probably admiring her face in a mirror), not even paying me the least bit of attention.