exercise for the left and right brain

As previously posted, in my process of writing my novel; I discovered some left and right brain exercises to get my mind prepared for some serious creative writing. Last Tuesday, during momma's night off; I got a chance to flex my brain muscle and was quite impressed with myself.

I used some suggested exercises from Your First Novel (my new favorite book) and took to my writing station for a "workout".

Left Brain exercise: First Liner. Copy the first line from any novel and then keep writing what YOU think should happen next. Write for 10-15 minutes without stopping.
Payoff: I started with a line about a guy noticing a girl in a bar (hahha, it actually came from a pretty raunchy romance novel) and ended up with an interesting start to a story about how this man recognizes the woman from a missing person's ad he read the day his wife kicked him out of the house a few years ago. This might sound cliche, but as my hand was moving, the story started to unfold in my mind - not all at once, but each sentence I wrote was like a sneak peek into another part of the story. My mind started racing about how interesting that this man might feel a connection to this girl who was missing/lost because he first saw her on such a significant day in his life (the day his wife left him and he also felt "lost")...hmmm.
Feelings:  great!  It was a lot easier of an exercise than I initially thought it would be and I was proud of how quickly a story could come out of my brain from thin air.

Right Brain exercise:  Self Praise for your book.  Write future quotations that will adorne your book cover of all your rave reviews.
Payoff:  A whole page filled with interesting and positive quotes from the New York Times book review and my favorite authors.  Things like, "Studer's writing is a breath of fresh air to this genre."  and  "inspired!" and "Such a fascinating idea, I'm a little jealous I hadn't thought of it first"
Feelings:  I had both an uplifting feeling that so many "people" had nice things to say about my book (hah, that's a little schizy) but also felt really self conscious praising my own work, kind of like the same way that most people hate writing a cover letter...it just feels awkward and arrogant.  I can see the benefit of pumping yourself with confidence, but it sort of highlighted the fact that I can't be sure that anyone will say any of that about my writing.  ah.

I had a great time exercising my brain.  I did one more exercise - 100 things - Now its on to the research!

YOU keep writing too!!