Objective-based exercises

I’m getting to the point where I can put together a week’s worth of daily newsletters in one night. Each week has a theme, and I’m using ChatGPT to help me brainstorm the themed exercises now.

Rather than jump ahead to the next week’s set of exercises, though, I’m starting to work on objective-based writing exercises. These would be distributed to the paid tier (currently 0 members), so I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. But I want to sort out the details ahead of time and also have some examples in place when I finally tackle marketing.

My plan is to create a set of linked exercises that walk through the creation of a particular type of fictional work: dramatic monologue, children’s story, or horror story for example. I would publish a single post that links to a set of exercises and gives an overview of the objective, encouraging the writer to not just finish writing the piece, but submit it for publication as well.

• Flash Fiction: This month I want to post the first set, which will focus on seven types of flash fiction, from “six-word stories” to “short short stories.” This seems a good place to start since each exercise will be stand-alone.
• Zero Draft: Next I want to try something a bit more challenging: Creating exercises to generate a zero draft for a short story. This would end up being a linked set of 21 exercises (three per day) that focus on writing “into the dark,” but with a structured approach. Day 1 the author would write about two characters and a relationship-based plot thread. Day 2 they would write about a setting, terrain-based plot thread, and action. Once all these parts are written, the author should have everything they need to generate a first draft for a short story.
• NaNoWriMo: My stretch goal won’t happen this year, but the ultimate form of these objective-based exercises would be a set of exercises in October for a book proposal, and an entire month’s worth of exercises in November for NaNoWriMo. But that feels like more of a 2025 thing.

Of course, all of this depends upon the central question, “Are objective-based exercises useful for writing fiction?” Yet another good reason to start working on these ASAP.