Writing Exercise: Routine, Interrupted

Sometimes the hardest part of writing is starting. There's so much pressure to come up with a good idea that you forget there are good ideas around you all the time.

In the coming months we’ll be sharing some of the exercises we use in our workshops to introduce new ways of finding inspiration and relieving a bit of the pressure.

This month's exercise comes from Keith Johnstone's book on theatrical improvisation, Impro:

If I say ‘Make up a story’, then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it’, people see no problem.

There are so many parts to a life and to a story. How do you know what to include? And why is the reader entering the story at this moment in time instead of the day before or after?

Johnstone’s approach to story as “routine, interrupted” offers an answer. We enter a story early enough to identify what the routine is, but late enough where the interruption of that routine is just around the corner. Any earlier and we’re skimming through the every-dayness of the character’s life before The Story begins. Any later and we won’t have an appreciation for everything that the events of The Story are about to change.

For this exercise, describe a routine and then interrupt it. Follow whatever story emerges.