Who needs to be Literary Fit?
No sane person would embark upon a marathon without intensive training and yet so many aspiring novelists begin their writing careers by plunging in at the first page. By the end of Chapter Two most are left gasping for air, have run out of things to say and sadly abandon their literary efforts for ever.
The exercises in this book are designed to help you sprint past Chapter Three. They’ll broaden your imagination, force you to take a look at different approaches to writing set scenes and hopefully make it so much easier to write to order.
When you’re physically fit, you don’t have a problem running upstairs. By becoming literary fit, you’ll stop your writing feeling (and reading) like an uphill struggle.
You can benefit from these exercises whether you’re a new or an established writer. As a beginner they’ll help you identify your strengths and weaknesses whilst making you more creative and adaptable. If you’re a long-time writer, who sometimes gets bogged down and has literally lost the plot, these exercises will allow you to step away from any problem and attack it with renewed vigour from a different angle.
There’s no need to have a novel completely plotted out in order to profit from this book. However, even if you’re a first-time novelist, you’ll probably have the bare bones of a story in your head before you start. You’ll understand who your characters are, the conflicts they face and the general direction they’re heading in. Using these exercises, you may find yourself creating key scenes that can then be woven into your main narrative once serious writing gets under way.
For writers already heavily involved in the creative process, these exercises will help free up your mind by obliging you to step outside of your current novel to explore different genres and avenues that will inevitably expand your competence as a writer.
There’s a school of thought that says writing can’t be taught and that one is born a novelist or not. This is completely untrue. No one is born to run a marathon – most make it to the finish line through years of dedicated training and sheer force of will. Therefore, just as runners can be taught to stretch themselves and their capabilities, so too can writers.
Writing regularly, to a schedule and striving to extend your range will definitely pay huge benefits and turn you into a much better writer.
How will the exercises help?
No matter how competent a writer you are, you will hit writers’ block. The less determined would give up the first time they encountered this barrier, deciding that maybe they weren’t cut out to be a writer after all. They’d tell themselves that writing should be easy and that, if they were a real writer, they’d be inspired to create……..
