How exercises work

Exercises are structured writing prompts with a constraint. The constraint is the point. It trains a particular craft skill by forcing you to work inside a boundary.

A few examples of constraints: write a scene that takes place inside a single held breath. Write dialogue where the real argument is never named. Compress a story to exactly 50 words.

Each exercise is tagged to one or more craft skills. Completing it adds XP to those skills and moves you along the six-level progression for each.

Finding exercises

Browse the exercise library from the navigation. Filter by writing type (fiction, poetry, screenwriting, and others) or by skill (dialogue, pacing, clarity, compression, and others). Exercises are labeled by difficulty, beginner through advanced.

The home page shows recommended exercises based on your skill focus and your experience level for that writing type. These recommendations use your submission history to surface the exercises most likely to move your weakest skills, at a difficulty that matches where you are in each type.

Each focus has a Continue button that takes you straight into a matching exercise for that writing type, so you can start writing without browsing the library yourself. You will also find these focus cards on the For You tab of the exercise library.

Quick exercises and full exercises

Exercises come in two lengths. Full exercises are the longer drills, usually 20 to 40 minutes, where you write a complete scene, essay, or poem. Quick exercises are short, focused warm-ups: a single paragraph, a headline, an error message, a few lines of verse. Most run under ten minutes and cap at a tight word count.

The Quick Write button surfaces one short exercise picked for your weakest skill, so you can practice in the time you have. A quick exercise counts toward your streak the same as a full one.

Pro exercises

Some exercises are marked Pro. They cover more advanced craft moves: sustained metaphor, subtext, cross-cutting a scene, writing copy that handles an objection. The free library is deep on its own, and Pro adds a focused set per writing type. A lock icon on the card tells you which is which.

Completing an exercise

Open an exercise and read the prompt. Some exercises include a moment or constraint you choose before you start, for example a character or a setting. Write your response in the editor. When you are done, submit.

The brief panel

When you start writing, the brief opens in a panel beside the editor on desktop so the prompt is always in view. It holds the prompt, the prompt picker (where you shuffle and reselect your moment, character, setting, or image), the constraints, the skills you are practicing, and the available XP. Pick or shuffle as often as you like; your choice is saved with your draft.

The brief stays open until you close it with the button at the top of the panel. Clicking back into the editor does not close it. To bring it back, use the Brief button in the toolbar. On phones the brief opens as a sheet over the editor, so it starts closed there: tap Brief when you want it.

After you submit, the prose engine grades your work and shows your results. You will see your scores for each metric category, how you compare to the benchmark for your writing type, and observations drawn straight from your text. Reading your results covers how to read all of that.

Exercises and your notebook

Your submission is saved to your notebook automatically. After submitting, you can keep editing it, publish it, or request peer feedback on it.

Length targets and constraints

Most exercises set their own length, either a range (250 to 400 words), a hard cap (40 words or fewer), or a line count for poetry. The editor keeps you aware of it as you write. A live counter shows your current word count against the target, and a constraint checklist ticks off each requirement in real time: the word count, a banned-word rule, a line count, or a structural rule like staying in one paragraph. You always know whether you are inside the boundary before you submit.

When an exercise sets its own word count target, your word count is scored against that target rather than a general benchmark. Short forms also tune what gets measured. A six-word story or a headline is not judged on paragraph rhythm or reading-grade level, because those numbers say nothing useful about one line. The exercise page tells you what it is measuring.

Image prompts

Some exercises hand you a picture to write from. An ekphrastic poem responds to a painting. A flash fiction drops you into a scene. A piece of descriptive nonfiction works from a photograph. These exercises use the same prompt picker as any other: when you open one, you get a small grid of images to choose from. Pick the one that speaks to you, or shuffle for a fresh set. The image you choose is your prompt, and it stays on screen while you write.

Every image is public domain, drawn from museum and archive collections like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and NASA. A small credit line tells you where each one came from. You can write to these images, publish that work, or sell it. The picture carries no strings.

The exercise itself may be free or Pro, and the lock icon on the card tells you which.

You can add to the image pool too. On the contribute page, choose “Artwork”, search the same public domain collections, and submit the one you like. A moderator reviews it before it joins the rotation.

Contribute your own prompt

The library grows from writers. Anyone signed in can add a prompt to the pool from /exercises/contribute, or from the Share prompts tab in /community. Pick what kind of prompt it is, tag it, and send it. A moderator reviews each one before it joins the rotation. Sharing your prompts walks through it.