I have one that I think helps - of course I made it up, so I'm biased.

Take a passage from a book you think is written well. For each sentence, ask yourself what, in your own terminology, the sentence is doing - what's the function of the sentence. For example, "a person reacts bodily" or "a decision is made involving time".

Then write your own passage for an entirely different story, wherein each sentence accomplishes the same function as what you encoded from the other passage.

For example, I did this to begin a children's story, taking my template from the first page of The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

THE READER by Bernhard Schlink

When I was fifteen, I got hepatitis. It started in the fall and lasted until spring. As the old year darkened and turned colder, I got weaker and weaker. Things didn't start to improve until the new year...

LULLABYE by P Aaron Mitchell

When the moon first appeared my little Zienna hid from it. The moon waited to see her for about 18 minutes, which is a long time for the moon. The moon felt for her with its beams but she just hummed to herself in the molasses jar. When the moon looked the other way she climbed out...

Maybe the relationship isn't obvious to anyone else, and that's okay. It's still good practice - you force yourself to tell your own story in a cadence that matches (at least to you) that of a strong writer.

You might be interested in Peak, by Anders Ericson. The author mentions him briefly, but the book is well worth reading. He looks at the case of Benjamin Franklin, and some of the strategies he used. In brief, he found pieces of writing that he especially admired, and transformed them in various ways, then tried to reproduce the original from the transformed versions. The version that seemed the post practical was to create a cue for each sentence, and attempt to reproduce the original wording from the cue. Another was to scramble the sentences of the piece and try to put them back in what felt like the most logical order. These seem pretty mechanical and rote, but they tie into an overall approach Ericson lays out called deliberate practice.

That’s an interesting question. My completely uneducated idea: reproducing masters’ works.

Take a novel, or something shorter, and type it up, thinking with each sentence, each page, why they wrote what they did, and what they left out.

There are a lot of different drills, several of which are listed below but will touch on.

1. Copy something you like. Take a sentence/paragraph/page/scene and just retype it in. This sounds crazy, but pushing the words not only into your brain but back out through your fingers gives your brain a different avenue into them.

2. Object writing. Learned this one from Pat Pattison's writing better lyrics, but most of the techniques are generally applicable. You take an object/idea, and for 5-10 minutes write about it using all 6 senses (the standard five plus motion). The more you do this the more your writing will shift (at least in my experience).

3. Journaling. Morning pages (3 pages at the very start of your day) is a common one for writers, learning to take the filter off and just write. A lot of crap might come out, and you'll just write about the day before or your concerns about the day ahead a lot, but the act of putting the words down will help you shift your writing.

4. This one isn't a drill but I wanted to include it: explore other types of writing. If you are interested in academic writing, try making short stories or poems. Exploring entirely different uses of words will help you build new, because intent shapes the way the brain uses the words, and learning to unlock different pathways can have surprising results.

I'm quite sure there was a great example in the book "Talent is overrated" that goes through this with one of the early US presidents. Basically this guy wasn't much of a writer but then he employed the "deliberate practice" technique to methodically study, pull apart, rewrite and review+correct some of the great writings of the day, to improve his own writing. And ultimately he ended up apparently being a great writer. I guess there's a science to most things.

I'm not a writer but I've used one drill where you set a theme and handwrite off the top of your head without pausing or erasing up to whatever set length. Like freestyling.

I assume that’d be doing some subsection of writing, like focusing on dialogue, or describing a scene, etc. From what I gather, you’d want to focus on one thing and try and get really good at it, then you could write a short story as a “scrimmage” to see how you’ve improved as a whole

Have a look a the writing for academic purposes material for second language learners.. there are books that break down writing into a process with stages that can be drilled.

Most writing drills are about reading critically: http://www.criticalreading.com/

Look into universities and approaches from Professors:

Jordan Peterson’s writing approach is based a lot on drill: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://jordanbpeterson.co...

Umberto Eco’s "How to write a Thesis"

What audience are you writing for?

Drill by frequently publishing work to that audience so you can get feedback and iterate. Build up larger works over time.