As a newbie writer, you might be thinking about important questions, such as what creative writing is and how you can write a creative essay or a short story. While you can immensely benefit from creative writing classes, we have listed some essential tips that will help you let out your inner writer.
Without further ado, let us jump into the list of four essential tips on how to improve your writing skills. While improving your writing skills, you should also focus on making your writing more interesting – whether a letter or a novel.
Let us move on to the first tip, which will help you make your writings more interesting:
Become an Avid Reader
The first thing that you need to focus on is becoming an avid reader. Once you start to read a wide variety of books, you can gain valuable insight and writing ideas from the resources of different authors. You can take ideas, writing styles, and even structures from a different author and create something very interesting.
If you only read one genre or read the books of one author, you won’t have a flare in your writings as everything will look and feel the same. If you want to write something that is truly interesting to read, you need to be able to have more than one spice.
That said, expand your reading spectrum. Also, make sure that you actively engage with what you read. For instance, when you come across a phrase or passage that you really like, you might want to pause and consciously think about that passage or phrase.
You may as well ask yourself how you would write the same passage or phrase – this way, you will be engaging with the reading material much more intensely than if you were to simply read it for the sake of reading it.
You get the point – becoming an avid reader will expose you to all sorts of writing and genres. Subsequently, your mind will start to think in different patterns that wouldn’t have been possible if you had been sticking to one author and one genre alone.
Write Every Day
The basic struggle of many newbie writers is that they mostly struggle with getting started. Now, there is no perfect day when you would start writing. So, to initiate your writing momentum, you might want to look at writing as something that is part of your daily ritual.
You must incorporate a set of habits into your routine that will help you slide into the writing process a little bit easier.
When it comes to the set of habits, it might require you to determine a certain spot where you can write uninterruptedly – or it could also refer to a set of habits that will enable you to get over the initial resistance.
Ideally, your writing spot should be free of any distractions – it should be a place where you don’t have access to video games, television, and even your phone (if you keep getting distracted by it). Also, your friends shouldn’t be allowed to enter that writing spot as well.
You get the idea – all you need is total solitude to go there, sit in that spot, and focus on nothing else but your writing. There are no word limits – you may write 500 words daily or seven pages. It is entirely up to you.
In the end, it also comes down to your mindset – every day when you go to that spot, you should know that you can only leave that place after you have completed your daily target of writing.
The interesting part is that once you build the momentum, your creativity starts to flow.
Now, the trick is to let go of your inner critic and just keep focusing on that writing part. You can always resort to editing and proofreading later. At this stage, your only focus should be to develop a writing ritual and make it a daily part of your routine.
Once you get into the state of flow, you will want to write more and more to the point of satisfaction.
Edit Later – Write Now
Creativity and creative writing, in particular, demand no boundaries, which means that you have to let go of your inner critic during the writing process, and focus on editing later.
In other words, you must separate your writing and editing processes. The thing is that once you start to edit your content while you are writing, your mindset entirely changes. While you were writing in a flow before – you aren’t writing in a flow anymore.
During editing, your mind is less creative – it is more analytical, which is why you arrest your writing momentum. The trick is to focus on one step at one time – when you are writing, your sole focus should be on writing alone.
Only when you have completed your first draft can you proceed to the editing process.
Read it Out Loud
Another tip to improve your writing and take things to the next level revolves around rhythm. The primary reason for reading your content out loud is that it enables you to get into the reader’s perspective and see things from their viewpoint.
Once you have completed your first draft of the novel, letter, or essay – whatever it is, you will want to read it out loud. While it might feel awkward at first, the thing is that by reading out loud, you can come across potential gaps and typos in the writing that you might have glossed over during the editing process.
Also, by reading it aloud, you can better understand how your content sounds – if it sounds weird to you, then it will sound weird to the reader – your target audience as well.
The Takeaway
As a newbie writer, you might struggle with loads of self-doubt. The underlying is to simply get started. Once you get into the starting momentum, everything else will start falling into place. Also, become an avid reader – the more you read, the more interesting content you can come up with.