Write Yourself Out of a Corner: 100 Exercises to Unlock Creativity

by Alice LaPlante

100 imagination-stretching writing exercises inspired by the idea of creative constraints, from the author of The Making of a Story.

When you are facing down a blank page (or screen), a constraint-based prompt—for example, "you must use the words 'cloud' and 'green'" or "you must set the scene in a crowded grocery store"—can get your brain working in unexpected ways.

In this creative writing guide, longtime teacher and novelist Alice LaPlante shares 100 original exercises that will simultaneously push you into a corner and give you the tools to write yourself out of it. LaPlante explains the purpose of each exercise—to sharpen your ear for dialogue, generate surprising images, or access intense emotions—and breaks down student examples to reveal how to achieve these goals. Whether you are looking to jumpstart new ideas or find a fresh angle on a work in progress, and whether you write fiction, creative nonfiction, or poetry, Write Yourself Out of a Corner will strengthen your imagination and your craft.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction

Audible Audio

Published June 6, 2023

About the author

Alice LaPlante is an award-winning writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer. She also teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her fiction has been widely published in Epoch, Southwestern Review, and other literary journals. Alice is the author of five books, including the LA Times bestseller Method and Madness: The Making of a Story (W.W. Norton 2009). Her latest book, the novel Turn of Mind, was published by Grove Atlantic in 2011 and won the Wellcome Trust Book Prize for 2011. She lives with her family in Northern California.

Reviews

[A.M.]

Man, I got to a quarter of the way through and this is not going to be any help to me.

It is all a bit literary fic, you know?

Did not finish at 25%

So far this year, my library saved me A$2726.68