How Writing Can Be Like Doing a Puzzle

If you want to practice writing stories, here is an exercise you might want to try. I used this in my class yesterday.  The results were quite fun.  We had enough time for all participants to do it three times each.

Writing can be a lot like putting together, as is the case with the exercise I did yesterday.  I wrote down over 100 words on paper, then cut each of them into small thin strips and folded each one several times. I then put all the words into a small bag.  Since I never know how many people will show (all our classes are voluntary) I made sure I had a lot of them.  I'd also wanted to try a similar exercise sung words selected from a dictionary, but everyone, including myself, like drawing the words from the bag more :-)

Try this if you are in the mood to write.  This can be quite fun.  Write as much as you can, it doesn't have to be very long.  You can do more later, if you wish.

Here is a sample of the words I wrote down to use in class (I had each participant draw six each time). I made sure I had some adjectives, adverbs, proper names and place names as well as nouns and verbs.  Can you make something out of these words?

goodbye

Bob

detect

format

drum

soon

Coincidentally,  as I began preparing for my lesson last week, I looked up this idea and came a upon this page, which is a generator for such a writing idea.