# Blueprinting and Writing Craft Exercises

## Story Architecture Exercises

### Exercise 1: Write Your What If
Write a concise, specific What If premise for your story. It must include:
- Context (the specific world and circumstances)
- Conflict (the seed of internal struggle)
- A thematic point (what question the story will interrogate)

Test: does your What If imply the collision between a character's inner world and external reality? If it could happen to anyone equally, it's not specific enough.

### Exercise 2: Protagonist Bio
Write a brief bio of your protagonist focused entirely on their internal life:
- What do they want most?
- What misbelief prevents them from getting it?
- What is their emotional state as the novel begins?
- How do they present themselves to the world vs. who they really are?

Do not describe their physical appearance or external circumstances unless these directly express the internal state.

### Exercise 3: The Origin Scene
Write the specific moment in your protagonist's past when the misbelief took root. This is a full scene — not a summary, not a memory, not an explanation.

Requirements:
- Write in the protagonist's subjective POV
- Include sensory detail, dialogue, and action
- Show the emotional logic — how this conclusion made sense at the time
- Make the reader feel both the pain and the reasoning

### Exercise 4: Escalating Backstory
Write 3-5 scenes from the protagonist's past showing the misbelief deepening over time.

For each scene:
- Present a situation that tests or activates the misbelief
- Show the protagonist interpreting events through the misbelief filter
- Show the protagonist acting on the misbelief
- Result in a consequence that appears to confirm it
- Tie external events to their internal emotional meaning

Each scene must escalate — the stakes increase, the costs rise, the misbelief becomes more entrenched.

### Exercise 5: The "Why?" Interrogation
Take your most uncertain plot point and interrogate it:
- Why would this character do this?
- Why would this approach seem rational to them?
- Why would others believe them?

Keep asking "Why?" until you reach bedrock — a specific past experience that makes the event causally inevitable. Each "Why?" answered produces a new piece of backstory or a new scene.

### Exercise 6: First-Layer Opening
Write a first-layer version of your novel's opening scene. It must:
- Establish the protagonist's internal state
- Introduce the unavoidable external problem
- Plant seeds of major internal conflicts

This will be rewritten many times. Use TK for things that must be there but aren't yet known.

### Exercise 7: The Aha Moment
Write a first-layer version of your protagonist's internal climax — the moment they confront and dismantle (or fail to dismantle) their misbelief.

## Prose Craft Exercises

### Exercise 8: Being Gorgeous
Write a paragraph to a page of narrative meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects. Show off. Use the whole orchestra. No rhyme or meter.

Variant: describe an action or a person feeling strong emotion, making the rhythm of the sentences embody the physical reality.

### Exercise 9: Short and Long
Part 1: Write 100-150 words of narrative in sentences of seven words or fewer. Each must have a subject and a verb (no fragments). Suggested: a tense, intense action.

Part 2: Write up to 350 words that is all one sentence. Suggested: a powerful gathering emotion, a family memory, a hospital scene.

### Exercise 10: Chastity
Write 200-350 words of descriptive narrative prose without any adjectives or adverbs. No dialogue. Only verbs, nouns, pronouns, and articles. Give a vivid description of a scene or action using almost no modifiers.

This is the most enlightening exercise in prose craft. It reveals which words carry the weight of your writing.

### Exercise 11: A Terrible Thing to Do
Take a piece of your own writing, 400+ words. Cut it by half — not trimming, but counting words and actually reducing to half while keeping the narrative clear and the sensory impact vivid. Long speeches and conversations must also be halved.

Discover which words are Styrofoam and which are heavy gold.

### Exercise 12: Am I Saramago
Write 150-350 words of narrative with no punctuation and no paragraphing. Suggested: a group of people in a hurried, hectic, or confused activity.

Discover what punctuation does by forbidding it.

### Exercise 13: Again and Again
Part 1 (Verbal): Write 150 words of narrative including at least three repetitions of a noticeable word or phrase.

Part 2 (Structural): Write 350-1000 words in which something said or done is echoed or repeated — in a different context, by different people, or on a different scale.

## POV and Voice Exercises

### Exercise 14: Points of View
Devise a situation involving several people. Write it five times:
1. Limited third person (Character A's POV)
2. Limited third person (Character B's POV)
3. Detached narrator (fly on the wall)
4. Observer-narrator
5. Involved author (omniscient)

Feel how each changes the story.

### Exercise 15: The Old Woman
An old woman doing a task (washing dishes, gardening, editing a dissertation) while thinking about an event from her youth. The narration intercuts between "now" and "then" at least twice.

Version 1: Choose first or third person. Use one tense throughout.
Version 2: Tell the same story using the other person, switching tenses between "now" and "then."

Do not search-and-replace pronouns. Rewrite, because changing person and tense changes the story.

### Exercise 16: Pure Dialogue
Two people in a crisis. Write it as A and B — no description, no stage directions, no "she said angrily." Everything about character, setting, and situation must emerge from what they say.

### Exercise 17: Being the Stranger
Write 200-600 words from the viewpoint of someone you dislike, disapprove of, or find extremely different from yourself. Suspend judgment. Inhabit them. See the world through their eyes.
