How do you learn about writing except by doing it? Writers need creative exercise in the same way musicians need to play scales. This kind of assignment can break you out of the limitations of writing individual scenes and let you interact with structure and meaning. Here’s an assignment by Lucy Ives. The whole list is wonderful.

Mysteries of Scale

This is an exercise designed to encourage one to rethink relationships of time and narrative—and, above all, how events occur in writing.

Try one or more of the following:

1. Compose a novel that takes place over the course of three sentences. The plot must begin, unfold, and end.

2. Compose a three-page novel. All actions and events must be represented in this space and your three-page novel should have at least one hallmark of a more “standard” novel: revelation, reversal of fortune, love and loss, adventure, dissolution of the self, villainy, redemption, transformation, and so on.

3. Write a two-page sentence. If possible, this sentence should not tell a story but should rather have all the features of a single sentence: being a contingent entity that plays a role and makes no attempt to say everything that might be said.

4. Write a thirty-page sentence. If you can do this, you are ready for the big leagues!

5. Write a hundred-word story. Set it aside for three months, then return to it and expand it by roughly seven thousand and nine hundred words.

Try inventing other possibly inappropriate or risky pairings of quantity of writing and genre.