6 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. She told me that while she wasn’t writing a screenplay, the book was extremely helpful for writing any kind of story.

She’s right, it’s a fascinating look at storytelling, and it 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.

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!, written by Chris Baty, also the founder of National Novel Writing Month. Yes, I wrote a novel as long as The Great Gatsby in 30 days.1

Sometimes creativity exercises are a bit boring – what’s 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:

Funny _____

Pick a drama, thriller, or horror film and turn it into a comedy.

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.

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.

_____ School

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

Versus!

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

My ______ Is a Serial Killer

Drama or comedy. Name an unusual person, animal, or thing that a paranoid can suspect of being a murderer.

It’s funny: seeing this exercise showed me how screenwriters got the ideas for several very famous movies!

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.

Do you have any exercises you use
to help spark your story-telling spirit?

Footnotes: Actually, I’ve written three very bad novels, all safely locked in a desk drawer. [?]Gretchen Rubin is the award-winning author of The Happiness Project, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Order your copy or read some sample chapters from the book. You can also watch the one-minute book video or listen to a sample of the audiobook. She is a regular contributor to Psych Central.

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Last reviewed: By John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on 30 Mar 2013
Published on PsychCentral.com. All rights reserved.

APA Reference
Rubin, G. (2013). 6 Quick Story Exercises to Spark Your Creativity. Psych Central. Retrieved on April 3, 2013, from http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/03/30/6-quick-story-exercises-to-spark-your-creativity/