Try These Quick Story Exercises to Spark Your Creativity

At the recommendation of a friend, I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need.

Even if you're not writing a screenplay, it’s a fascinating look at storytelling, and also includes some terrific exercises to foster creativity.

This kind of playful thinking is fun. It’s fun to mess around with ideas, to have new thoughts, to come up with a great idea. It might even inspire you to write a screenplay or start a novel.

Sometimes of the usual creativity exercises are a bit boring – I keep reading about that tiresome exercise with the candle, the cup, the matches – but these exercises by Snyder, meant to jump-start ideas for movies, are very amusing. They might even make a fun game to play with friends.

1. Funny _____
Pick a drama, thriller, or horror film and turn it into a comedy. Take The Fugitive, make it funny.

2. Serious _____
Likewise, pick a comedy and make it into a drama. Serious Animal House – Drama about cheating scandal at a small university ends in A Few Good Men-like showdown.

3. FBI out of water.
This works for comedy or drama. Name five places that a FBI agent in the movies has never been sent to solve a crime. Example: Slob FI agent is sent undercover to a Provence Cooking School.

4. _____ School
Works for both drama and comedy. Name five examples of an unusual type of school, camp, or classroom. Example: “Wife School.”

5. Versus!
Drama or comedy. Name several pairs of people to be on opposite sides of a burning issue.

6. My ______ Is a Serial Killer
Drama or comedy. Name an unusual person, animal, or thing that a paranoid can suspect of being a murderer.

Seeing this exercise showed me how screenwriters got the ideas for several very famous movies! Can you think of examples?

Feeling creative helps boost happiness. While people often associate brooding melancholy as the spirit most appropriate to creative outpourings, research shows that people tend to be more creative when they’re feeling happy.

Blatant self-promotion: in The Happiness Project, I talk about my experience of writing a novel in a month, inspired by the book, No Plot? No Problem!, by Chris Baty, also the founder of National Novel Writing Month. Yes, I wrote a novel as long as The Great Gatsby in thirty days. (Actually, I’ve written three very bad novels, all safely locked in a desk drawer.)

Do you have any exercises you use to help spark your creative spirit?

Photo: Quasifly, Flickr