Effective Creative Writing Tips for Newbies That Worked – IIM SKILLS

Creative writing – Is it a talent or a skill to be acquired? Crafting an original work inclusive of fiction, poetry, or non-fiction takes time, practice, persistence, and consistency.

Can you imagine it to be a science? Well! There’s no exact science to creative writing.

Creative writing is any sort of writing that bounces beyond the normal professional writing that includes journal writing, academic writing, or literature (technical forms) that stresses more on narrative craft, character development, and the usage of literary tropes.

 

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To get started you can follow the below creative writing  tips:

1. Simply! Write about what you know…

Write what you know- it’s good advice for beginners. Use the elements like settings, characters, situation background, and language that you’re already familiar with and create new stories from the environment that you already know. Craft these elements together using research you’ve already done. Do remember your background, what you bring to the act of writing, is valid and creates uniqueness as what anyone else can bring.

2. Also, Imagine and Write about what you don’t know…

Tune on your imagination to create new situations, new characters, new situations, new relationships, and even new worlds to reach your desired horizon. Imagination is often defined as the key to creating your dreams and building your future. Make readers travel to different worlds by writing about a different period in history or a place that you’re not familiar with.

 

Feed your imagination regularly and wherever your imagination needs help, fill in the gaps with research. The best thing about being a creative writer is creating and being creative.

 

3. Read widely, aloud, and well!

Writers predominantly love reading. Make it a point to regularly read and familiarize yourself with the published writing in your chosen field, maybe modern poetry, literary fiction, thrillers, fantasy, and so on.

 

A good reading can encourage good writing. Reading allows you to explore the styles of worldwide writers and you can gain inspiration to improve your writing.

 

Just don’t limit yourself to reading only popular books or your favourite ones. There are myriad book collections available, everything from fairytales to scary stories. Take a look at your favourite comics, short stories, novels, and poetry. Just gain the knowledge and wisdom of other writers by research and very soon you’ll be like them!

 

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4. Hook your readers – an art of captivating the readers

It is crucial to invite the readers and hook them into your content. Hooking the readers is an art of captivating the readers.

 

The opening sentence or paragraph should encourage the readers to continue; perhaps by making them react, laugh, or feel excited out of their curiosity.

 

First impressions are very much mandatory to any reader’s decision. First impressions decide whether or not your readers want to be active in your world of narrative. This makes the exposition (an element of a story plot) of any novel or short story particularly important.

 

 

What is a PLOT?

In creative writing (or a narrative), a plot is the sequence of events that make up a story, whether it’s told, written, being filmed, or being sung.

 

The plot more specifically indicates, how the story develops, unfolds, and flows in time. If your narrative borders on bland and uninteresting, readers will soon lose interest. It all lies on the initial page or two of your narrative that they’ll determine whether they want to quit or carry on reading.

 

Let’s try any one of the below ways to hook your readers,

• Let the readers wonder: Rise a question in your readers’ minds. What does the first line mean? What’s next? Make them ponder the question, and you’ll keep them reading.

 

• Starting at a pivotal point.

By starting at an important point in the story, your reader is more likely to continue so he/she can discover what will happen next.

 

• Narrate by creating a vivid picture.

You can electrify your reader with your narrative by creating an interesting picture that encourages your audience to imagine a scene in their minds. The potential to generate a scene in the mind of the reader rather than simply being told by the author creates a hook among the readers.

 

• Crafting an intriguing character.

Crafting an intriguing character in your narrative brings a promising reader who has developed an intriguing will and no doubt, has been fascinated by your story’s narrative. This entertaining character needs to be one of the main characters in the book.

 

• Start with an unusual situation.

Introducing characters in unusual circumstances will create a grip for the readers to stick around to see what it’s all about.

 

• Start with a compelling narrative voice.

Begin your story with the voice of a narrator, that can be instantly identified, or one that freshly relates things.

Keep your readers in mind and open the story in any preferred way. Decide – What elements make them continue reading? And what elements will potentially make them put down your book?

Therefore, you need to write, developing a strong ‘hook’ — one that grips onto the reader so tightly, they finally can’t let go of your narrative upon reading the first few paragraphs.

 

Let us consider the intriguing sting in the tale of the opening sentence of George Orwell’s 1984 – “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

 

A very traditional opening is felt and then “thirteen” – it creates a curiosity to know more and so you read on. Also, look at the first sentence of Raymond Carver’s short story – Viewfinder – “A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.” This would be a short sentence but with so much that we need to have explained. We’re hooked.

 

5. Write about real-life events and create emotional connectivity

The hardest part in creative writing is connecting emotionally with your audience. Fix your focus on real-life events, so that in some way or another, your readers will be able to relate. Remember that with creative writing you don’t need to use real names or details. There are certain things you can keep private especially while writing about the rare details. It’s better to go for real-life events to inspire the readers.

 

6. Let your characters impress!

When you build a character, find out about the people we meet, what they say to us, how they express it, their choice of words, their accents, and their verbal habits.

 

Readers should be able to imitate the same with fictional characters too. People on the page stay lively when they start exchanging dialogues.

 

Writing dialogue is quite challenging at times, needs a lot of work to make it fresh and authentic, editing repeatedly to make it reachable – but it’s worth the effort.

 

7. Show the picture rather than telling

A description loses its interest when you use too many adjectives and adverbs and can slow up your narrative and cause your readers to lose interest.

 

Wherever possible, it’s better to expose your readers to the characterization, what a person is, about the prevailing atmosphere in the room, the relationship among the characters – show them by writing what they say, how they interact, and what they do.

 

Bring out the picture effectively rather than telling the reader through wordy piles of information. That is quite tricky.

 

8. Pacing your story

Pacing is really important. You don’t want to just start and then quickly jump into the main conflict in your narrative because this will absorb the excitement away from your conflict. And at the same time, introducing the solution too early will make your conflict too easy for your characters to solve.

 

Gradually build up your conflict by describing your characters and the many events that lead up to the main conflict. There lies the key! And introduce now. Next, make the conflict more difficult for your characters by including more than one issue in your story to solve.

 

9. Think about themes to hook readers

Every story or narrative has a theme or a moral at the end. There are varieties of themes to choose from – some stories are about friendship, others are about the dangers of trusting strangers. A narrative or story can even have more than one theme. The purpose of a theme is to give something valuable to the readers once they have finished reading your book. In other words, themes provide us with a life lesson that will stay evergreen in the mind of the reader.

 

10. Use the dialogue carefully

Dialogue writing is a tricky one to get right. Avoid writing too many dialogues unless you’re writing a script.  Also, it is strange to include no dialogue at all in your story.

 

The purpose of dialogue is to move your story forward. It indicates a chance for the readers to learn more about a particular character’s personality and their relationship with other characters in your narrative/story in a  book.

 

Make the dialogue short, like small talk! Dialogue about the situation creates more interest among the readers. Irrelevant dialogues don’t move your story along.

 

11. Find your writing style

The best writers always have a particular style of writing. When you think of Roald Dahl, you know his books are with a good sense of humour. Alternatively, when you look at R.L.Stine, you know that his work is all about horror. Now think and adapt your writing style. Decide – Do you want to be a horror writer? Or someone who always writes in the first person? Focus – if you can write on a culture or a particular character?

 

12. Get it right the first time

Always aim at getting your first narrative as near perfect as possible. Few writers manage to bring out such quality the first time. Always aim for the best and do your best from the very start.

 

13. Follow polishing to perfect your writing

A perfect narrative can be reached through the editing process which gives a polished text. Editing is not the same as proofreading; it’s about much more than correcting errors.

 

Editing involves carefully going through your work to see if any text is left out, which text needs a change, finding out what you have to do to improve your writing, making it sharper, tidier, and fixing better readability.

 

Editing is hard work. It’s said that Ernest Hemingway took the last page of the title A Farewell to Arms through nearly 40 drafts. Therefore, never give up if you feel you’re getting nowhere.

 

14. Plan your opportunities for writing

Most aspiring creative writers claim that they simply don’t have the time to make the most of their ideas. While you analyze a typical day, there are always some intervals –  may be using public transport, waiting for a friend, time spent in the waiting room of the doctor or dentist – when it’s possible to pull out a writing pad, a laptop, a tablet and just grab the opportunity and write. Identify your opportunities – a few minutes are enough to draft a few sentences down and narrate them.

 

15. Stick on to a routine

A well-planned routine is extremely important to creative writers. If you have not fixed a habit of setting a writing routine you’ll soon give up on writing altogether! A strict routine means that every day at a certain time you will have to find time to write about something and anything. Even if you’re bored enough or can’t think of anything, you’ll still pick up that pencil and write on it. Soon one day you’ll get into the habit of writing good stuff regularly and this is the most crucial one for anyone who wants to be a professional creative writer.

 

16. Follow your passions

Writing can be a tedious one and many people even give up after writing a few words or narratives. The only way you can keep the fire burning is by writing for and about your true passions. Just write about whatever you enjoy doing or love to do. Activate your thoughts on your area of interest and you’ll enjoy researching. And since you know so much about it already, you can make writing a whole lot more fun!

 

17. Keep a notebook/diary

A writer’s best friend is their notebook/diary. Wherever you go make sure you carry a notebook handy to jot down the new ideas you get on the move. Ideas out of inspiration can come from anywhere. Write down your ideas which you can tend to forget, hence making it habitual to note in your notebook/diary.   You will never know, these ideas could become a best-selling novel in the future.

 

18. Research your ideas

Beginning your narrative with a couple of ideas should always be followed by research. The consecutive step would be to research these ideas deeper.

 

Researching your ideas involves reading books similar to your ideas or searching online to learn more about a particular topic. For example, if you wanted to write a book on Mammoths, you would have to search for everything about them in history and bring out a good, relatable storyline for your book.

 

19. Create Writing Goals

Simply, just create writing goals for yourself, to know if your writing is improving over time. Your writing goals might include, writing 100 words every day or writing 600 words by the end of next week. Make sure, you measure your goals reached. In this way, you’ll come to know, if you have attained your writing goals or not.

 

20. Daily Exercises to practice

To retain your creative writing skills up to scratch, it is important to keep practising every day. At times when your mind is blank, you should try to use tools like writing prompts video prompts or other ways of generating ideas. You could even search online for daily writing exercises and write on to practice.

 

21. Work together forming groups

Writers can work together with other writers in a writer club or writer groups in various online publishing sites too. Every writer needs help now and then. Together you can share ideas, tips and even write a story and that can add little fun too.

 

22. Get the feedback

Without feedback, you’ll never be able to move towards effective writing. Feedback is important to every writer. Good feedback motivates you better. While bad feedback just gives you areas to improve and adapt to a better writing style. After every piece of creative writing always try to get feedback from friends, family, teachers, or an online writing community.

 

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In Conclusion

Anyone can confidently become a good writer once they have learned the necessary skills.
Creative Writing involves an artistic process – writing that is generally viewed as a craft anyone can learn.
As discussed above many creative writing tips and approaches, all of which involve a range of creative techniques define creative writing.

Creative writing is all about the imaginative use of language and is effective in overcoming writer’s block. Creative writing’s core concept stays in the light-hearted manipulation of language. These creative writing tips and techniques help to create ideas for a story that can be the best seller of the year.