Create Your Book Cover Writing Exercise

Lari Bishop, the Managing Editor at Greenleaf Book Group, shared an exercise at Austin Publishing University that is designed to help you think about your book as a complete product, even before you start writing it. The exercise was originally developed by author and consultant Kevin Daum. Here is the exercise:

1. Fold a piece of paper so that it looks like a book jacket (legal size paper works best, but anything will do).
2. On the front, write the title and subtitle.
3. On the inside flap write your elevator speech for the book. Keep it to 3 sentences max. 
4. On the back, write 2 endorsements/blurbs for the book--what you would want people to say about it.
5. On the inside back flap, describe why you are the person to write the book. 
6. On the inside of the jacket, describe how you are going to structure the book to make it compelling to readers.

Try this exercise and see if it helps you think about the book in a way that lets you address not only how well its written, but who would be interested in reading it and why they would believe you are the best person to deliver it. 

Happy Writing!

A Picture’s Worth

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well a good picture is, anyway.

I stumbled across a link on Twitter this morning that I just had to share it here. Thanks to @WritersRelief for this link: http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/.

It’s a page on Flickr that shows nine interesting pictures from the last seven days. What a great tool for writing exercises! You don’t have to go out and find them yourself. Just go here and pick one.

So now you have no excuse. Go out and write 1,000 words about one of these pictures. Okay, maybe not a thousand words, but perhaps 20 minutes. Or a haiku (the suggestion from @WritersRelief this morning). And when you’re tired of them, click on the reload button and get nine more. Awesome!

~Doug McIntire
www.DougMcIntire.com

The Exquisite Corpse

At our last writing meeting, Brian Wittenbrook (http://brianwittenbrook.com/) introduced us to a writing exercise called The Exquisite Corpse. I’d like to take a couple of minutes to share the exercise with you because I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

There were five of us participating in the exercise and I think the more people you have, the more interesting the results. I can imagine that you need at least three people.

Start out by giving each participant a long strip of paper about an inch wide, give or take. Each participate writes an article and an adjective, something like “A blue” or “The long.” They then fold the paper so that what they’ve written is hidden and they pass it to another participant.

The second participant writes a noun, folds the paper then passes it.

The third participant writes a verb, folds and passes.

The fourth participant writes another article and adjective combination, folds the paper again, and passes it along.

The final participant writes another noun. At this point you can pass and open the paper, or just open it without passing.

We took the sentence we each received and used it as a twenty-minute writing prompt.

The sentence I received was, “A green duckling lollygagging the sweet whale.” Now I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, but I was actually able to create the beginning of a short story that I plan of completing. And what I found so wonderful about it, the sentence prompted me to write in a style that I’ve never tried before and is completely unusual for me.

So if you’re finding yourself in a writing rut, get together with some friends and give The Exquisite Corpse a try. It might be just the thing to kick you back into gear.

~Doug McIntire
http://www.dougmcintire.com/