A Story Grid instructor explains why writers should do targeted exercises before starting their novel. Like practicing scales before the Moonlight Sonata, isolated scene work on dialogue, showing versus telling, and endings builds skills that speed up completion and prevent endless rewrites.
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If you're looking at Story Grid, you might be thinking, I don't want to do writing exercises. I don't want to practice the skill of writing. I have a novel. I need to finish this novel. I just need help with this one book. And I hear you. And yet I want to explain why this skills-first approach actually gets you to finish a novel faster, not slower. I was recently talking to a writer and she was telling me about how she was constantly working on her novel, trying to make progress, and yet she kept feeling kind of stuck in it. She didn't know if it was working. She would end up going back and re-editing things. Uh, and then she started worrying, like, is she actually making progress? Is she wasting her time? Is she developing bad habits? Or is this actually how it goes for every writer? And that's a completely reasonable concern because you've got a novel burning a hole in your brain and someone's telling you to just do exercises first or practice the skills first. That can feel like a detour when you just want to finish this novel. So here's the analogy I like. Imagine you want to play on the piano the song The Moonlight Sonata. It's a beautiful piece. You can hear it in your head. You sit down at the piano and nothing. Your fingers can't do what your brain wants them to do. You could spend the next 6 months just trying to play the Moonlight Sonata over and over, getting frustrated, making the same mistakes, or you could spend 6 months on scales, chords, finger exercises, and then sit down and play the Moonlight Sonata in a fraction of the time. Writing works the same way. If you jump straight into your novel without scene-level skills—how to write dialogue that doesn't feel stilted, how to show instead of tell, how to build progressive complications, how to nail an ending that shifts value— you're going to hit those same walls you've been hitting over and over and over. The exercises aren't a detour. The practice isn't a detour. They're the fastest route. You isolate one skill at a time, get feedback, master it, and then move on. Now you're good at that skill for the rest of your life. Then when you sit down to write your novel, you have all the tools instead of guessing your way through it. And here's what I want you to know. Our program does get to your novel. It's not exercises forever. Once your scene-level skills are solid, you move into short story, learning how multiple scenes work together, and then you move into novel planning and writing with your mentor guiding you through the whole thing. The difference is when you get to your novel, you'll actually have the skills to write and the confidence to write for the first time.
