Exercise is good for you. It keeps your heart healthy, helps you lose weight, and may one day enable you to outrun a hungry tiger. Writing exercises have similar benefits for your writing life. They can help illuminate aspects of character, breathe life into a dull setting, or plant the seed of a future story.

But why do an exercise when you could sit down and write something real? If you are in the zone and everything you put on paper sparkles like gold, by all means run with that. Finish that short story or start that novel. But no one, no matter how talented a writer, can produce brilliance every time they sit down to write. That’s where a good writing exercise comes in handy. Wondering why a character won’t confront his parents? Do an exercise with him as a young boy listening to his parents fight. Having trouble with physical descriptions? Try to describe, in detail, everything you see around yourself. Lacking ideas for a new project? Go out in the world and listen to people. Catch fragements of conversation and fill in the possible details. See where that leads you.

There are countless writing exercises out there (a Google search for them turns up nearly six million hits). Not all of them are appropriate for your dilemma. If you’re having trouble with plot, chances are you won’t get as much out of an exercise about setting compared to one actually involving plotting. So you need to have an idea of what it is that’s causing you trouble. Even just identifying the problem is useful in its own right. From there, pick an exercise related to your issue and tackle that sucker.

But what good would a discussion on writing exercises be without an example? Here’s one that I’ve found to be quite useful in my writing. It’s from John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth, titled ‘Attributions’. Here it is, in full:

“Take your central character and write his name at the top of a blank sheet of paper. (You can do this with all of your characters if you want.) Now list as many of his attributes as you can think of, including physical characteristics (look closely-an indentation on the earlobe suggests an earring in the past; the eyes?-what color brown are they?), hobbies, fears, worries, emotional hang-ups, dreams, things that he enjoys, sleeping habits, favorite foods, and so on. In short, everything that makes him him. Now you already know a lot more about him than you did five minutes ago. Pick one of the attributes and brainstorm ways in which that attribute might be exploited in terms of your story. Then revise your story with this new facet of character made visible.”

At the end of the day you still have to write in addition to doing any exercises. But with any luck those exercises will get you past whatever is blocking you, and onto the next page.