Here is an entertaining way to push your writing muscles to the max while lounging on the couch or having fun with family and friends.

We know we have to build our muscles to run a marathon, but how do we build our muscles when it comes to writing a book? Maybe you’ve started by keeping a diary, writing short stories, or taking creative writing classes. These are all great ways to build up writing muscles. These are like training runs compared to the marathon that is the book.

Writing a book, the length of which starts around 50,000 words and is often nearer to 100,000 words or more, takes serious planning and time. A book has a longer arc than a short story as it will naturally have many more ups and downs as the story builds towards the and resolution. It will have more characters and more plot twists. It could incorporate a significant amount of research. Once you’ve written one book, it is far easier, mechanically speaking at least, to write the second. This is because you’ve developed some serious writing muscles.

If you are writing a book, you are in training. You know this because by the time you are done you are a different writer. You will have writing muscles you didn’t know existed. You can feel your existing writing muscles better as they are so much stronger (and hopefully not strained or pulled). Like the big calves and hamstrings you build training to run long distances, you’ll have strengthened your creative writing muscles as well as the ones for good grammar.

Aside from writing your actual book, how can you build those muscles? Shorter writing activities might hone different skills and muscles, but the point is to get used to book-length story arcs, so how do you exercise those book-sized muscles? There is one very easy and fun way to give them a true workout without much effort:

Get creative with the books you read and the movies you watch.

In this form of mental exercise, you get to dip in and out of famous books and movies, and learn about yourself and the mechanics of these great works. Doing this with crap movies also works as you see in detail where they should have gone or what makes the story so awful. Knowing where not to go with the story is almost as valuable as knowing the right direction.

Use the book or movie as writing prompt – and you don’t have to make the effort to write anything. You couldn’t anyway. You don’t have time to write a whole book or movie just for fun. That is the whole point of working out your book writing muscles in this way. You work in your head – and ideally over a very short amount of time – to see what you can do to advance a plot. Even if you pull a complete blank, you’ll learn a lot when you see where the real writer went. You’ll learn how to bring in the element of surprise. You’ll learn how great writers are free to take the story in any direction they like. You’ll also be honing your understanding of one of the most important concepts in literature and screenwriting: the Three Act Structure.

Most mainstream movies and best-selling books are based on the Three Act Structure. If you don’t already know it inside and out (you should as a writer), you should brush up on this literary device. In its basic form, this is the practice of dividing the story into beginning, middle, and end (or setup, confrontation, and resolution).

You can do this as much or as little as you like for a movie, or just when it strikes your fancy to do so. Stop the movie and try to fill in how the plot with continue. What will the writer do next based on what you’ve seen so far? What will happen to each character? Where will the next big drama come from? Do you think the writer intends to bring in new characters?

The end

In general, there are two types of endings: one that is known from the start, and one that draws its strength from the element of surprise. There are variations, like mysteries which are total surprises, but you always know there will be crime and a solution. The plots of many movies can’t be predicted, but some of the best clearly can.

For stories with “announced” endings, especially blockbusters, like alien attacks on the earth where the heroes always win, the entertainment is not in the ending per se, but in seeing how the author chose to get the characters from start to finish. If the story is billed as a romance, you know the couple will fall in love, but the joy is in seeing it happen. We are just waiting for that exquisite resolution at the end, and the more improbable it looks in the middle, the better bang the end will be.

For stories built around surprise endings, it can be more fun because you’ll feel amazed if you come anywhere close to predicting the real ending from the clues the writer leaves behind. Most times, if the writer is worth the paycheck, you won’t be anywhere near the right neighborhood. You’ll learn, in this process, how great writers throw curve balls and bait and switch with the best of them. You’ll feel those jaw-dropping plot twists with a whole new appreciation for the talent behind them.

You’ll also get the rhythm of the Three Act Structure if you look for its hallmarks. Once you have the opening scene behind you, pause and have a think about where it might go. To kick off the action, the lead character(s) will be confronted with a terrible conflict or choice: the inciting incident. Stop and think, “How will they will handle it?”, Can you predict the midpoint, or the lowest point, where all seems lost, that comes before the ? How will the lead respond? See if you can determine how the writer will move the plot to the and resolution. If you are really paying attention and have the creative juices flowing, see if you can tie up all the loose ends with equal or better solutions in the denouement. What final secrets might be revealed?

This is really more of a game, but the mental fitness benefits are surprising. It also means a chance to learn and grow as a writer while “goofing off.” There are many great movies out there, some based on best-selling books, so this can easily be turned into a very serious pursuit. The trick is just getting a great movie that you don’t already know the plot of. Try this once, and you might find you do it a lot. This is like getting a taste of formulating lots of book-sized stories from start to end, which ends up being a serious workout over time.