Good Start for 2011 #3

Exercise Your Brain

It's all well and good to have plans and ideas for your 2011 writing projects, but if you aren't really in shape, they won't come off too well. Physical exercise is proven to stimulate brain activity—the increased oxygen firing synapses and so on—but even that isn't enough. Your brain needs exercise, too.

Suppose you decide to knit a sweater for your favorite pooch; you even have a pattern. But if you haven't done any knitting in a while, taking up yarn and long plastic needles won't produce satisfactory results. As with any discipline, exercise is critical, whether it's knitting or playing golf, or writing. An idea will be in your head, but getting it to even a first draft can be a struggle if your brain is at a loss of how to go about it.

A good initial brain exercise is to read with a purpose. Read a portion of a piece, by an author whose writing you appreciate, and take notice of how this author has used words and sentence structure, developed pace and characters. Now try your hand at it. Create a scene that has the same type of flow. It might take several tries, but that's what exercise is all about.

Using a "What if" is also a good exercise. "What if Joanne Fosbeck, a happily married conscientious first-time mom, believes her 6-year-old daughter Shawna has become a chef extraordinaire from watching the FOOD Network." Or "What if Barry Cranston, 46-yr-old rancher, has to hunt down the cause of his stock getting killed in order to keep his newly established genetics program from going under." Develop the characters for these, write the paragraph that is Joanne's moment of revelation, or Barry's acute consternation. These particular what ifs might really seem off the mark for what you like to write. That makes it all the better. Work your brain beyond its comfort zone.

These examples can be augmented with many brain teasers, including vocabulary building and even jigsaw puzzles, which make the brain think about the logic and structure of things. Exercising your brain a few times each week will increase your writing ability, and result in more comfort when you work on your project.