As you now know, there are a lot of skills that go into being a great magazine writer. But at the heart of all of them is usually a passion for writing itself. There's no better way to rejuvenate and enhance that passion than by setting aside time to do some creative-writing exercises.

While magazine writing is a creative enterprise, the term “creative writing” refers to a specific style of crafting words into sentences, paragraphs, and stories. When you're working on a creative-writing exercise, you should be more focused on the way words interact on the page than you might otherwise be on things like word count, punctuation, and even grammar.

The idea is to set yourself free from the daily constraints of writing 1,000 or 1,200-word magazine features and instead let your writing instincts carry you as far as you care to go, on any subject that pops into your mind.

Doing creative writing exercises is sort of like taking a walk in the park as opposed to setting a treadmill's timer to maximize your walk's physical impact. When you're doing writing exercises, you should let your mind wander a bit off track, just to see where you — and your writing skills — might end up. You can do this in many ways, but two of the most common ideas are to focus on a detail or to focus on your imagination.

Focus on a Detail

When you focus on a detail for a creative-writing exercise, you shut out everything else around you and try to find new and interesting ways to describe an object you know all too well. The idea here is to do stream-of-consciousness writing — just letting the words flow out of you and onto the page, regardless of whether they make sense or not. You will be training your senses of observation more than anything, helping yourself to better gather information in the future so that you will have better material to work with when writing articles.

Starting this kind of exercise is easy: Choose an object on which to focus, and just start writing. The object can be as complex as your car or as simple as the blade of grass growing outside your garage. The point is to write about that one object, and nothing else, for as long as you can, or for an allotted amount of time that you give yourself (say, anywhere from ten to thirty minutes).

You'll soon learn that if you focus on any one thing long enough, you can find many interesting things to write about it. The task itself will be fun exercise for your brain, but the skills you get from doing the task will continue to benefit you throughout your magazine-writing career.

Focus on Imagination

You can also use stream-of-consciousness writing exercises to jog your imagination. This is obviously most helpful to writers of fiction, but nonfiction magazine writers who do these kinds of exercises tend to find them helpful in terms of broadening their capacity to come up with new and interesting article ideas.

One prompt from the site www.creativewritingprompts.com is a good example of this type of exercise: “Use the first line of any nursery rhyme to tell a story.” You can certainly imagine any kind of story you want with this exercise, but in letting your ideas flow onto the page, you in many cases will see patterns and ideas that you may have subconsciously been working on all along. If nothing else, you may come up with an interesting turn of phrase that you can tuck away and use later to make one of your magazine articles really sing.

Word Limits

Some creative-writing exercises are not done in stream-of-consciousness style but instead with word limits. These types of exercises are terrific for writers who want to improve their conciseness, particularly for leads and nut grafs.

Again, here's an example from www.creativewritingprompts.com: “In 200 words, describe a hot day.” Now, there are plenty of writers out there who could go on for 2,000 or even 20,000 words about a hot day. If you're one of them, then perhaps learning how to pare back your work to essential words and phrases will be a more helpful creative-writing exercise.