7 Writing Warm Ups for More Productive Writing

Wonder how to stimulate and encourage your brain to simply dive into the writing process?

A few warm-up activities will help to get your words and ideas flowing.

Why is it important to warm up? The answer is quite predictable: to avoid the writer’s block and start writing right away. You would be surprised at how much writing will come from you once you’re warmed up. You’ll easily banish all distractions and get down to putting the words on paper.

Here are a few proven ways to make you think and force your brains into action.

1. Describe What’s Going On Outside Your Window

It is the easiest writing warm up ever! You just to have look out your window and write down your observations. Try not just to focus on people, buildings and weather, think what else is there. Do you see something unusual? Consider the people’s emotions and imagine what they may be talking about. Try to be specific to make sure that your description takes no more than 5 sentences. It’s just a short warm up that shouldn’t last more than 15 minutes.

2. Write Imaginary Definitions of Unknown Words

Take a dictionary and open it on a random page. Find a word you are not sure how to define. Then create an imaginary definition for it. Play with words and you’ll discover new ways of saying old things. Be inspired and your imagination will help you produce the most vivid descriptions. Repeat this exercise for several times until you feel that your brain is warmed up enough to proceed with your main task.

3. Describe Your First Experience

Describe your first. Your first day of school, first kitten, first job, first car, first yoga class, first date, it doesn’t matter – all will make excellent stories. The first time of doing something is always an exciting experience, so you’ll easily find the right words to describe it and avoid that situation of staring at a blank sheet of paper. Concentrate on your emotions and start developing them in full – get the creative juices flowing!

4. Pretend You’re a Travel Writer

Find a world map and blindly put your finger somewhere. Then pretend you are a travel writer and tell about the weird experience in that particular country. What happened? How did you behave in that unusual situation? How did you solve the problem? You may include anyone and anything you want into your story – locals, taxi drivers, bartenders, random people. You’ll get a killer piece of content, just take some inspiration and put your pen to paper.

5. Create a Half-Page Monologue

Creating monologues is a great way to warm up, so get in the habit of writing them. Take a newspaper or go to google news, find an interesting headline, then decide on a character who comes from that headline and write a short monologue for that character. Be specific, it is just a warm up and you don’t have to create a long piece of writing. A half-page monologue will be more than enough to get your brain into the writing mode.

6. Write a Letter to Your Future Self

Writing a letter can be a really wonderful experience. There are no restrictions on how old you should be – one year, five years or 10 years from now. What would you say? What kind of person would you be? What goals would you want to have achieved? Think about your place in life, your achievements or fails. First of all, identify the period of time to write about and start writing. Don’t pay much attention to the letter format as it’s just a quick warm up.

7. Consider a Free Writing Session

Give yourself a time limit and go. Don’t stop, just get the words on a page. Write about everything that comes to your mind. Don’t give your brain a moment to stop or evaluate your ideas, set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and write without interruption. Free writing is not the time for editing or judging, you need to keep your pen moving. You will see that a free writing session is beneficial for more productive writing.