Dear Writers,
This is what I want to talk about today. Your brain is a muscle and you must work it out.
Writing exercises get a bad reputation. People hear “writing exercises” and they picture a MFA workshop where everyone sits in a circle and journals about their inner child while burning sage. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about keeping your brain in fighting shape. Crosswords. Pangrams. Word games. All of them. As often as possible.
Your phone just updated and now there are 600 new things that happen when you take a screenshot. The world is getting more complicated every single day. Your brain needs to keep up. You need to be thinking on other levels, on other planes, or you will get left behind by the sheer velocity of everything.
But there is one exercise that sits above every other exercise. The one that will sharpen your writing faster than anything else you can do. The hardest one. The one most writers avoid because it terrifies them.
The single most effective writing exercise I’ve ever found.
It’s not journaling. It’s not freewriting. It’s the thing that forces you to show instead of explain and cut every weak word.