Looking for some great creative writing exercise suggestions

[klbritt]

As the title of my post suggests, I am looking for some great creative writing exercise suggestions. I'd love links to blogs, websites or even some of your own ideas.

Thanks,
Kristie

[polymath]

Within my writing community that spans the globe, spans ages, cultures, genres, individual and collective identities, the number one bar none shortcoming, difficulty, frustration is voice. Of the three most named qualities demanded by marketplace forces, voice is the most prominent, then craft, then mechanical style.

Voice is the attitude of a central persona toward a topic, be it an approving or disapproving voice, forelorn or woebegone, optimistic or ironic, or whatever. Voice is also the comparative distance between a narrative's several possible persona voices: author, implied author, viewpoint character, and other characters' voices; that is, narrative distance as it pertains to narrative voice.

Dave King's survey of narrative distance:
http://www.davekingedits.com/pov.htm

A reading assignment helps to understand the voice gamut, a survey, so to speak, of voice characteristics: Seymour Chatman's Story and Discourse.

An extended exercise based on that text, investigation, meditation, application, and more meditation: closely read, dissect, and imitate favorite texts for how the authors manage voice.

From the ancients' techniques for learning and developing voice through the Progymnasmata, the first excerise, Fable: select a fable from Aesop's Fables and rewrite the whole, paying special attention to converting indirect discourse into direct discourse (also discussed in Story and Discourse), which closes narrative distance bewteen narrator and viewpoint character by emphasizing the immediate person, time, place, situation, and event of a scene. Readers favor close narrative distance for its participation mystique strengths, like they are experiencing a narrative through the central persona in the moment and place of its unfolding dramatic action.

The Progymnasmata from Silva Rhetoricae;
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Peda ... asmata.htm

Actually, the above follows my theory and others' of a creative writing andragogy: read writing method concepts, read texts which illustrate the concepts, discern the methods of applying the concepts, emulate the concepts, apply the concepts.