IWW
Practice-W Exercise Archives
Exercise: Free-for-all
These exercises were
written
by IWW
members
and administrators to provide structured practice opportunities for its
members.
You are welcome to use them for practice as well. Please mention that
you found
them at the Internet Writers Workshop
(http://www.internetwritingworkshop.org/).
Prepared by: Rhéal Nadeau
Posted on: Sun, 1 Apr 2001
There will not be a set exercise this week; rather, members will
need to
decide what they want to work on, creating their own exercise then
writing a text that meets the goals of that exercise.
State your exercise in 50 words or less - if you can't say what
you're
trying to achieve in this many words, your exercise is too complex.
Narrow things down further. (Acceptable exception: you are allowed to
write a preamble discussing the topic, the way we usually do when we
post as set exercise, but the exercise itself must be short and clear.)
Your text should be no longer than 500 words (and if possible, under
300
words.) This is longer than the usual limit, to take into account that
some of the self-assigned exercises may require more room.
There are many ways this can be done:
- do one of the previous exercises (or a variant on a previous
exercise) which you didn't submit a text for.
- redo a previous exercise (or a variant), based on what you
learned.
- identify an area you'd like to improve on, for example you might
want
to work on dialogue, showing vs telling, etc. Make the exercise
specific enough that the other members can critique your text
accordingly.
- heck, if you see someone else's exercise you like, there's no
law against using that one.
Use your imagination. The exercises don't need to be specific to
fiction - you could tackle some aspect of poetry or non-fiction, for
example.
When submitting your text, include the exercise you've assigned
yourself, followed by the text.
Rhéal Nadeau's wrap-up
Posted on: Sun, 8 Apr 2001
I've found this an interesting week. Without a set exercise,
participation was down a bit, but we did get 10 diverse
submissions. This week sums up one of the underlying lessons of
this list: the variety of challenges writers face, and the equal
variety of ways to tackle those challenges.
I think I will repeat the free-for-all occasionally, but before I do
I'll create a Web page with all the previous exercises (so people
can look through those to see to get ideas.)
Thanks to all who participated!
Rhéal
Web site created by
Rhéal Nadeau and
the administrators of the Internet Writing Workshop.
Modified by Gayle Surrette.
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