Kindle Unlimited costs only $9.99 per month and it’s one of the cheaper subscription services out there any writer can get. It’s also one of the most useful things that costs the average writer less than what they would pay for a few coffees – and if there’s anything that’s true about most writers, it’s the fact that we drink a lot of coffee.
Although a lot of writers might not have realized this yet, the Kindle Unlimited platform can be useful for more than just reading and publishing. It can also be a great way to get to writing exercises that teach you how to be a better writer – it’s not exactly what you’d call book writing software, but it can help get you writing.
Here are a few writing exercises you can do together with Kindle Unlimited – and an introduction for how to get started.
Intro to Writing Exercises
Kindle Unlimited has a near unlimited supply of books, some of which are in the public domain and were written a few decades ago and many newer titles with a catalog that gets updated on a regular basis – and can even include your titles.
For most of the writing exercises mentioned here, your goal is to choose a book that you aren’t familiar with, ideally written by an author that you don’t know yet. Then, choose a random page, paragraph or sentence depending on the writing exercise.
Why? It’s one way to broaden your knowledge and practice your writing skills. It’s like improv, but for writers.
Remember that these type of writing exercises almost never end up for publication: They rely on being inspired by other works, but they a great way to exercise the writing muscles.
1. Rewrite the Scene
Choose a scene in the book – any scene in the book – and then work on a complete rewrite of the scene. This might seem pointless the first time you do it, but about a few sentences into this you’ll start having more fun with it and the whole point becomes far more apparent. When rewriting the scene, you can do whatever you want with it and you can ignore where the original writer went with this scene.
2. First and Last – Sentence, That Is
Take the first and last sentences of a chapter in the book and write them next to one another. Then, ignoring the real middle part of the story, work on writing your own – or write a last sentence for the very last chapter that would change the direction of the entire story from there.
The point of this is to exercise being able to think very far outside the box, and this technique can later help you when editing your own story when you want to take it in a new direction or need to change something.
3. Adding Characters (That Don’t Belong There)
Choose a scene from any book that you have been reading off the Kindle Unlimited shelf. From there, choose a character from any other story you’re familiar with – including sometimes your own – and rewrite the scene with these characters included in it. They might be in the scene to offer commentary, advise, wisecracks or to move the scene towards the end – or they might just be there to mess with the order.
It’s a great writing exercise that inspires creativity and allows a writer to explore the things their characters can potentially get up to.
4. Alter an Ending
Story endings are often what makes stories memorable to us. You might not remember the middle scenes of your favorite movie or story in the perfect order, but you’re almost certainly going to remember how it ended – or the movie or story wasn’t worth it in the first place./
Choose a Kindle Unlimited title and practice your own writing skills by rewriting the ending paragraph. Yes, you can do anything you want: That;s the whole point of a writing exercise.