Ross encourages us to harness the power of aliases. We learn about Frances Pessoa, a writer with 75 pseudonyms, and we found an imaginary band and populate their world.

The Exercise:

1. Imagine a fictional band and pick a name for them
2. Give your band a desirable quality you admire but don’t have
3. Sketch out a brief profile of the band referring to their desirable quality
4. Name your fictional band’s first single and first EP or album
5. Come up with the track titles for the songs on your imaginary band’s first album
6. Take one of the song titles and write the lyrics to that song
7. The end result is a brand new piece of writing you can use to spark new ideas

Ross heads out to do some serious people watching. We learn about the many ways the great authors observed the people around them and we try an exercise that uses strangers to spark our imagination.

The Exercise:

1. Find somewhere to sit - a public place with lots of people streaming past
2. Start people watching and quickly scribble down as much as you can about what they’re wearing
3. When they walk out of site just stop and pick another person
4. Enjoy the feeling of just writing without needing to think about what to write
5. You can use the little details you notice to form an army of potential characters to work into your creative writing

Ross teaches us to listen to words in a new way by forcing them into unusual formations. We discover a technique that automatically disrupts our writing, pushing us into exciting new territory.

The Exercise:

1. Grab a favourite book from your childhood
2. Take the each word of the text, look each up in a dictionary or on dictionary.com
3. Count seven words down in the dictionary
4. Make a note of your new word and replace the original from the childhood book
5. Don’t be afraid to break the rules - if the word seven words down doesn’t feel like a good fit, then scan the dictionary page for a more suitable word
6. Doing this you’ll quickly end up with an all new, highly surreal story that contains echoes of the original
7. The surreal sentences you’ll be left with are the perfect source material to spark fresh ideas

This time Ross explores the peculiar mirror worlds where opposites are everything and we flip a famous poem on its head by creating a mirror world version of it.

The Exercise:

1. Pick a poem that you’re fond of
2. Copy that poem out onto a fresh page of your notebook
3. On the opposite page of your notebook write out the opposite of each word in your poem - up becomes down, in becomes out etc
4. Don’t worry about syllables and rhyming here - just focus on the ideas in the original poem and flipping them
5. The end product is a mirror world version of the poem you know and love

Ross examines the power of the unexpected. We meet the visionaries whose fractured sentences pushed the written word in new directions and we embrace chaos by using random words to revolutionise our writing.

The Exercise:

1. In your notebook write out “that night the moon was a [BLANK] [BLANK]”
2. You’re going to describe the moon by filling in those blanks
3. Pick a random book
4. Open a random page and stick your finger on a word - that word fills in your first blank
5. Repeat stage 4 - the second word fills in your second blank
6. Keep repeating stages 4 and 5 until you find words that feel like they’ve never sat next to each other before - the whole point is to generate a surprising effect
7. Use the sentence you’re left with as the starting point for a story or a poem
8. You can also scrap the moon and use any word you fancy - this is a powerful technique for any time you need unusual descriptive words

Scissors at the ready! This time Ross is celebrating the fine art of the cut-up technique in which authors slice up texts to create striking new works. We splice two obituaries to create a fictitious hybrid life story.

The Exercise:

1. Find two obituaries in the newspaper, or copy from a document online
2. Go through both looking for evocative lines
3. Copy lines you like from one obituary on to one side of your notebook
4. Copy lines you like from the other obituary on to the other side of your notebook
5. Start stitching your two lists of sentences together, combining both sources
6. Get creative, mash the first half of one sentence with the second half of another - there are no rules here!
7. Slowly a brand new character will appear - a whole life story that never existed, one that you’re free to adapt and play with in your writing