Writing Exercises
In early 2026, I finished my most recent webcomic, The Rest Is History. For the previous 15 years, whenever a comic was done, I had always transitioned immediately into the next one. But my health had worsened, and I came to the difficult conclusion that my body would not allow me to continue as a sequential artist. I didn't have the energy to devote 6-12 hours to a single page. The mere physical acts of sitting at a desk and holding a tablet pen were causing me pain I could no longer ignore. But just because I wasn't making comics anymore didn't mean I had given up on my passion for storytelling.
When I started telling stories all the way back in 2005, I did so in prose. I didn't know what comics were and I didn't have the artistic skill to make them. So instead, I wrote short stories, and dreamed of being a novelist. As I got older, I continued to write prose, both fanfiction and original works, although I never took it as seriously as I did my comic art. But with comics off the table, I decided that maybe prose was worth revisiting. It turned out that I loved writing prose, and also I wasn't nearly as good at it as I was at visual storytelling, since I hadn't spent 15 years (and a college education) honing those skills.
Around the time I was having this dilemma, I joined a writer's group that posted one writing challenge per day for the month of April. This proved to be the perfect opportunity to hone my rusty writing skills, and also develop a narrative voice for the novel I had started to conceptualize. I didn't do every prompt, just the ones that inspired me, and I took some creative liberties with the prompts themselves. I'm very proud of the results, which you can read below.
All stories take place in the world of the Corvidan Archipelago, which you can read more about in my lore wiki here. Or just enjoy them out of context.
April 1: Nonlinear Storytelling
Write about the same location at different points in time, but write the events out of order so that they must be
pieced together by the reader to figure out what actually happened and why the location is important.
April 6: Monologue
Write a piece of passionate monologue where the speaker has a captive audience listening to them confess a major secret.
April 8: Minimalism
Write a scene where a character receives some important news using only short, concise sentences.
No flowery descriptions, just focus on bare essentials over details to convey emotional impact and imagery.
April 9: 10 Second Story + April 24: Repetition Loop
Write a story that takes place over the course of only 10 seconds.
Use one sentence that is repeated throughout the writing to drive emphasis.
April 11: Second Person Perspective
Write a scene or short story using only second person "you" language.
April 12: Dialogue In Questions
Write a scene of dialogue where the characters return to a place (a home, a school, etc.) and find
something that shouldn't be there. The trick is: their dialogue must be only questions.