The writing exercise that made my career

If you’re not doing writing exercises, you probably haven’t discovered your best — and weirdest — ideas.

I don’t remember how or why I first thought up attic notebooks. Was I at my wit’s end, desperate for some way around stifling perfectionism, with no idea what to write? Or was I just idly trying something I’d heard about? I don’t know. It was years ago. What I remember is my surprise and delight when it paid off. That’s what sticks with me and it’s why I go back to it again and again. It never disappoints, and has proven its value so many time — both directly and obliquely — that I do my best to make time for it as often as I can.

What’s an “attic notebook”?

It’s an ongoing writing exercise in which you commit to filling up a notebook in short, regular sessions without looking back to read what you wrote until after it’s full + one month. That is, you only move forward, never peeking backward, and once you reach the last page, you close it, put the date on the cover and set it aside, only to be opened after a month has gone by.

My experience has been that when I finally get to read it, I remember almost none of it and it feels like finding a weird notebook in an attic, full of glittering fragments of stories, poems, ideas, imagery. Hence the name: “attic notebook.” Except, unlike a random notebook I found in an attic, I actually wrote this one, and can use whatever is in it!

I’ve written at length about how a commitment to playful writing exercises gave me my career (as an internationally bestselling and award-winning novelist published in over thirty languages). Still, even knowing how important it’s been to me, when I’m stressed out, in the thick of a novel, I tend to fall out of the habit. So I love it when something happens that very clearly reaffirms for me how invaluable it is and makes me eager to get back into it. Well, that happened this summer, not for the first time but in a totally new way. It involved ghosts and a hippie festival in the forest, and I’ve shared about that here if you’re curious.

But for today, the basics:

Why should you cultivate a practice of playful writing exercise?

I often hear from the writers in my Patreon writing community that they don’t have time to do writing exercises — that when they have time to write, in their busy lives, they need to spend it on their novel. I completely get that. Time is precious and I default to that mindset too. But given how massively transformative this practice has been for me — how necessary and integral to my past successes — I know it’s worth it to make time to play.

There are a lot of reasons why, but the most important one is also the hardest to explain, because it has to do with the mystery of creativity itself. Where do ideas come from — or, having come, how do they mingle and mutate and grow? What is imagination, and how do we level up, get to the good stuff deep within ourselves, and fit it together into mosaics of feeling and meaning? How do we get to that place beyond worry and plot and analysis, where story lives and breathes and characters come to life and language blooms and sparks?

Me, I don’t get there easily. I’ve always struggled with perfectionism (a kind of tyranny of the brain where the fear of…falling short?…manifests as creative paralysis) so for years, “writing” for me meant polishing sentences to a high gloss while daydreaming about the books I would one day write. There was a huge disconnect between my fantasy future career and my actual habits and practice. For years. But eventually the absurdity of that disconnect became so glaring that I had to either get past it or give up the dream, and that’s when I started developing strategies to actually, truly write — not just high-gloss sentences, but stories, even novels. A lot of this, honestly, was just pure miserable determination, for more years until, through habit, practice, and chance, I began to occasionally stumble into nicer corners of my mind, where there was less tyranny and so much more creativity.

I got there — I only ever get there — by going around my perfectionism, and the best way I know to do that is: yup, playful writing exercises. They defuse the tyranny somehow, and allow me to fall into a much deeper well of creativity, even sometimes into that mystical place where it feels like it’s not coming “from” me but “through” me. It honestly feels like magic. I’ll never get tired of seeing what wild, unexpected things can arise from ten minutes, a notebook, and a prompt.

To make a long explanation short: A practice of playful, non-goal-oriented writing exercise can loosen you up and even train your brain to access a flow state, with the huge, huge benefits that entails, both for your spirit (god, it feels so great) and your work.

Which brings me to the next reason I recommend writing exercises: It makes your work better! It’s no secret that the more you do a thing, the better you get at it. The more sentences and paragraphs you write, the more adept you become with prose. The more dialogue, the more characters, etc. The question here is: why put in time doing exercises that could be spent on your novel?

First: It’s only a few minutes. Ten, fifteen? Speaking personally, I could easily spend that long rearranging a single sentence in my novel. (And oh, I have.) My novel is a very different place from my notebook. It has a high threshold of expectations, for one thing, plus established parameters of plot, mood, theme, etc. Writing a novel is a long-haul effort, and the further you get into it, the more your creative pathway narrows, with the needs of the developing story channeling you in an ever-more-specific direction. The feeling of wide-open wonder and possibility is replaced by a lot of figuring stuff out. On good days, I may make wild discoveries and feel free and dazzled, but more frequently I’ll be negotiating with my characters, solving puzzles created by my past self, and trying to get things “right.”

In my notebook, meanwhile, there are no expectations and no parameters. Anything can happen, and oh boy, it does. The prompt I wrote from yesterday was “cookie bitch” and I’m still laughing about the premise that arose from it. I get so many ideas, none of which I would otherwise get, and some of them are amazing.

Once, on a retreat at the Oregon coast, it struck me that writing exercise is a lot like beachcombing: Every day, new things wash up, and yes, there’s a lot of seaweed and broken clam shells, but there are treasures too. If you’re not there to find them, either someone else will (and get the amazing story idea that could have been yours, ha ha), or the ocean will take them back like rejected gifts: glub, into the depths.

The way I try to do them, writing exercises are a collaboration with the unknown. They’re an active invitation to the unknown to come play with me. I’m showing up on the beach, so to speak, and I’ve found that the more reliably I do, the higher the treasure-to-seaweed ratio, with some absolutely thrilling finds among them. The current contenders for my next novel, which I’m developing and trying to choose between, were both born in my attic notebooks, and there are so many more strange, beautiful, jagged, terrible, delightful bits and pieces in their pages. They might stay there, or who knows, they might grow up to be ghosts at a hippie festival in the forest!

I think a lot of writers either never do exercises or think they’re just for beginners: to develop skills until you graduate to novels, then never look back. And that’s fine. Your choice. (And more treasure on the beach for me 😉. But if you want to give it a try, I made a super-fun list of prompts for September (“Promptember”) to take the thinking out of it. There are no rules and no wrong way to do it. Me, I just take the prompt of the day and start writing. This is a rare case where advance preparation will only hurt you — because if you’re anything like me, if you give yourself time to think at all, expectations will start to grow. So: no planning, no thinking, no expectations. Just hold the prompt lightly in your mind and start writing. See where it takes you.

A few things:

1. If you get onto a weird tangent that takes you away from the prompt, fine! It was only meant to get you going.
2. If you get bored with the path you’re on, start over and find a new one.
3. You don’t have to “finish.” Set a limit, either in pages or minutes (for me, 3 pages = roughly 15 minutes), and just stop there, no guilt. (Of course, if you want to keep going, keep going!)

An “attic notebook” isn’t necessary for prompt-writing, but I think it’s a great way to build the creative habit for a couple of reasons:

1. Since you’re not allowed to read what you wrote, you can’t judge it, so you can’t get discouraged. You turn the page and move on. The further you get into the notebook, the more those early pages turn to mysteries, and the quieter the inner critic becomes. Eventually, in fact, your inner critic will just abandon the space altogether because it has nothing to do! It will wither and retreat (and wait for you back at your novel probably 😂) Overall, process will be allowed to outweigh outcome, enabling a nimbler, looser creative mindset — and more cool stuff on your beach!
2. Since it involves filling a notebook, there’s a built-in goal with a reward at the end of it. You want to fill the notebook so you can read it and be surprised and delighted by the strange things in that you’ve mostly forgotten. (And I want to say that, while I’m a certain age now, I’d forget even when I was younger. Since these pieces are written in a kind of fast fugue, they don’t imprint in your memory the way a well-polished sentence does, or a carefully crafted scene. There’s an ephemeral, dreamlike quality to the process, but they’re dreams you’ll have captured on paper to read later.)

— Hint: Thin notebooks make the goal more attainable; if you have to fill 500 pages for the payoff, chances are you’ll quit. I use Moleskine “cahiers,” the “large” size which is 5x8ish, 40 pages, soft-cover, and come in packs of three.

— Yes, you can do this in a document if writing in a notebook isn’t feasible for you. If you can write by hand though, I encourage you to try. There’s a lot of research behind this if you’re interested, but just personally I find it easier to loosen up when I’m writing by hand. Plus: a physical notebook is better for habit building (there it is, right on your desk, staring at you!) and better to have afterward for reference. (I totally go through mine for ideas, even years later.)

So that’s my pitch. I hope you’ll give it a try!

Here are the “Promptember” prompts:

“Cooke bitch” was yesterday. I’m going to tackle “ransom note” right after this!

Feel free to use these as you like. If you want to share, a lot of members of my Patreon community are doing Promptember and we have a Discord channel for it. It’s been so much fun seeing what wildly different directions people take from the same prompts.

[UPDATED 10/24: I’ve just gotten to open and read my most recent volume of attic notebook, and as always there were some really fun discoveries! I’ve posted three of them HERE.]

For other exercises besides prompts that I use in my practice, see this Medium post, where there’s a linked Patreon replay of a fun writing session I did recently with four of my favorites.

Laini Taylor is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, the Strange the Dreamer duology, and other books. She’s been translated into more than thirty languages, shortlisted for the National Book Award, and won a Printz Honor. You can find more about writing, as well as a warm and active community of writers at all stages, at her Patreon and Discord, where she meets with members on Zoom every week.