C is for... Coffee break creative writing exercise

You don't need to spend hours on your writing to feel creative. Fuel your imagination wherever you are with our 15-minute coffee break exercise.

Set your timer for five minutes.

Write the letters of the alphabet down the left hand side of the page. Create a ‘story poem’ with each line beginning with the next letter of the alphabet – for instance:

Annie filled her basket with
Bread and set off for the
Church where she was meeting her boyfriend.
Dan was hiding in the bell tower
Ever watchful for…

Write as quickly as you can – don’t worry about it making sense at this stage.

Stop when the buzzer goes at the end of five minutes.

Set the timer for another five minutes and write brief character studies for the people in your story. Who are they? What do they most want? What guilty secret are they trying to hide?

For your last five minutes, see if you can begin to shape this raw material into a flash fiction story. (You may find this exercise gives you enough raw material for several stories!)