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