I’ll begin this part by quickly sharing a cheat sheet to help you with your creative writing expedition. Before you begin writing, make sure you have a good notebook, a decent pen, plenty of paper, a computer or laptop, a desk or other writing space, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.
When writing your first draft, don’t worry about a great opening line yet. Simply start writing wherever you like! Also, keep the flow going in the early stages. Endeavour to keep writing without stopping, going back, re-reading or changing what you’ve written. Additionally, remember to show, not tell. How to do this? Think about how to dramatise what you’re writing about and create visual images. If you become stuck on a particular passage, start somewhere else and get going again. But if you ever feel really stuck for inspiration, try doing the following:
Find a postcard, photograph, or painting depicting two or more people and write a story about them. Also, look at any object and write about it – where does it come from, who does it belong to, and who might want it? Read the newspaper for unusual and interesting stories and develop them as fiction. You might also want to listen to conversations on the bus, in a café, or at the supermarket. Jot them down and carry them on, seeing where they lead you.
Another way to get ideas would be to pick up a book you really like and open it at a random page. Pick a sentence you like and write it down, and then carry on writing your own story. If that doesn’t work, pick an emotion, and create a story around it. Go on and pick another emotion and carry on writing. Do something – make the characters move from the first emotion to the second.
Now, if you would like to develop and improve your writing, consider going on a writing course; joining a writer’s circle; finding a good library and using it; reading and re-reading good writing; and attending book festivals, readings, and bookshop events.
Let’s now talk about how to discover your specific talent. Do you love plot? Do you enjoy working out timelines? Do you enjoy organising different strands of your story and weaving it all together, plotting your story on cards or using a computer programme to map it out? This might be you. You might also be the writer who loves description – looking at something and finding the best way to capture it in words and using images to convey its essence to the reader. Some have an ear for dialogue, for how people speak, accents, and dialogues, and for the silences that lie between the words. Some writers have a wonderful visual sense; others an ear for the rhythm and sounds of words.
How easy would it be to know what you’re really good at in terms of writing? You don’t only have to try out something new to find out. True, some techniques worked for you when you were in school or when you wrote letters and emails to friends. Now, though, you need to stretch yourself and try different ways of writing. Why is that so? You’ll never discover that you’re brilliant at writing dialogue if you never try it, or that the first-person voice gives huge freedom, or that your story works much better if you set it in a different time or place. You’ll never find out that you are a poet if you never try to write a poem. Bottom line? Keep these principles in mind: you need to trust yourself; write what you want; try out new ways of writing; don’t expect to write brilliantly straight away; and learn from other writers.
Creative writing is a skill, and if you work at it, you’ll improve – becoming a good writer is a simple as that. Writers also use a range of techniques, which you too can learn. Part of the problem with writing is its solitary nature. When you’re working on your own a strong possibility exists that you’ll be reinventing the literary wheel. Through long hours and hard work, you may stumble on the truths that other writers have discovered long before you. By talking to other writers, reading books, and perhaps going to creative writing courses, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble.
Keep in mind though that no substitute exists for finding time to write. Of course, whether playing the violin, excelling at tennis, or developing computer software, all the outstandingly talented people put in a great many more hours than their less successful peers. You must really want to write. Writers become writers by writing, not by wanting to write, thinking about writing, or planning to write. Lots of practice make for significant improvement.
Putting in the time required to practice makes all the difference. How many hours are we talking about here? Well, 10,000 hours is quite a lot. If you wrote for, say, five hours a day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year, it would take you eight to nine years to put in that many hours. In practice, of course, many successful writers have written less than this – and other writers may have written more without ever getting into print. However, without doubt, the more you write, the better you become at it. This should comfort you and motivate you to do the best you can.
In a follow-up article, I will share more tips on what can help you with your creative writing. More specifically, we will examine how reading and re-reading can boost your writing abilities. How can you guard against obstacles that unwittingly impede your progress? What can help you silence that inner critic that makes you feel like an impostor? And how can you progress on your journey to creative thinking that leads to creative writing? These and more will be covered in the future. Stay tuned