The Power of the Five-Minute Writing Exercise
And how it’s become the key to unlocking my creative potential
During my final year of college, I began a writing group of five (and later four) people to motivate constant written production. We met for two hours every Monday in one of the campus cafés, mostly to workshop each other’s submissions and discuss the elusive elements that make pieces in The New Yorker or New York Times Magazine so excellent. I, of course, loved having a scheduled time every week to openly discuss and hone of my greatest passions with a group of similarly dedicated creatives, but my favorite part of every meeting lay not as much in the conversations as in the quiet writing time at the beginning of every meeting.
I’ll explain: to get the “creative juices” flowing, I’d ask everyone to take out a writing implement of their choosing (computer, pen and paper, colored pencil and journal, etc.), and write, for five minutes, about a single word or phrase that the group voted on. No judgment, no need for masterful organization — simply stream-of-consciousness craftwork without any pressure to perform.
The first two or three meetings, we were all skeptical of the exercise’s value; our writings were disjointed, confused, and faux-profound. One of my particular writings (on the subject of “Table of Bones”)…
