creative writing tips

creative writing tips

Creative Writing Tips

1. Introduction

Learning to write well is one of the most important skills you can learn at college, yet many students think that writing is solely the task of compiling grammatically correct sentences in the right words. Although grammar and correct word usage are important, these alone do not make a good piece of writing. A piece of work with poor content but presented well gains more credit than a piece of work which is excellent in content but presented poorly. Essentially, good writing and the skills you need to develop are best learned by actually doing it. Writing is a craft and as a craft, whilst there are tried and tested formulas that you can follow, there is still a good deal of room for creativity, style, and individual flair. There are a number of methods and practices which have been under the scrutiny of time and multiple writers, and from the amalgamation of what was discovered to be successful, it’s possible for you to save a lot of time and leapfrog a few of the hurdles on the track to writing excellent pieces. This is what this guide is all about. Reading it will provide you with a comprehensive understanding of how to write great essays, and while it will not provide you with a recipe for writing that is foolproof, a guide to writing great essays speaks about every aspect of essay writing in depth and at length, it need not be read in sequence from beginning to end. A piece by piece method has been attempted, and it is a well-structured method, which is advised you follow while you are working through the book, doing the segment on planning before you are about to set upon writing an essay, and the section on polishing finer points once you have finished a draft. The seven stages of essay writing provide the ideal way to link the various methods and practices in this book to your in-depth and insightful learning. By following the seven stages, the topic and acquiring certain knowledge, it would be effective to employ mental efforts to understand a complex or problematic issue on the part of the reader will come from your teacher, you will have a fair idea of what type of information you are to collect and the best places to obtain said information.

2. Developing Characters

A powerful character can completely make or break a work. Whether the reader/viewer loves or hates them, they need to find them interesting. To do this, make sure you know your character inside out; even if the reader/viewer will never know all of the details you have thought of, it is essential to know them all yourself. A valuable way of doing this is by writing a character biography, even if only a few lines. This should include the character’s full name, age, birth date/place, likes, dislikes, who they get on with and who they do not among other factors. Remember that characters, like people, develop over time. Experience, time and events change them and it is wise to show this in your work. A story in which a character is no different at the end than they were at the beginning, is not an interesting one. Personalities can change, people can change and characters must change too. An effective way of showing how a character developed throughout your story is to use a character profile. As well as developing the actual character, it is essential to build a connection between your character and your reader/viewer. If your audience has no feelings towards a character, then they are uninterested in their fate. Make them love or hate the character, pity or envy them. A recent online article “Ten Ways to Make the Audience Absolutely Hate Your Characters” gives a wrong but useful example of what you should try not to do!

3. Crafting Engaging Plots

One of the best ways to make sure your story has internal consistency, and that you’ll have to make fewer changes later if you realized that something doesn’t quite make sense, is to put some thought into the world of your story. Here we’re not just talking about fantasy or sci-fi worlds – even if your story is set in the “real world,” every character inhabits their own tiny pocket of reality, and part of what makes a character’s dialogue and action consistent and believable is the fact that it’s occurring in a specific context. The world of your story is composed of whatever details are necessary to understand what’s going on, and why. What are the social, political, geographic or economic factors that have a bearing on the story? What is the history of the world leading up to the story’s present? What are the rules of the world? (I.e., in stories in any medium, no more resurrections unless it’s really integral to the plot.) If you have a clear, solid understanding of what is and is not possible in the context of your story, it’s easier to ensure that your plot doesn’t suddenly break its own rules without your realizing it. And you don’t need to explain all these things to your audience directly or immediately, if at all – it’s just important that you know these details for yourself. Your world should also be interesting and original enough that it can be a selling point for the story on its own – but remember that your plot and characters should still be enough to make the story compelling even if it occurred in a more standard setting. In any story, the characters should be the most important “moving part” of the plot. It is the characters and their desires, qualities and flaws that shape the events of the story and give them deeper meaning. Often in new authors’ plots, things seem to happen because the author said they must in order to arrive at their desired conclusion, or the events of the story seem mechanical and divorced from any larger significance. This is less a problem of “plotting” and more a problem of not having developed fleshed-out characters with clear motivations. Once you truly know what your characters would or would not do in any given situation, based on their nature and their current circumstances, you will have a good guide as to what events should or should not take place in your story, and you will be able to do a better job assessing the merits of a particular event or how it should be executed. Note that when we use the word “character” we do not necessarily mean a sentient being – every persistent entity or force in your story, from a race of creatures to a disease, can be thought of as a “character.” And compelling characters are not necessarily “sympathetic” characters, but they should always be interesting ones. A character is compelling whenever it has some quality that makes the audience want to see more of that character. And every character should have its own role to play as a function of what the character wants and how the character interacts with other characters and elements of the plot.

4. Enhancing Descriptive Writing

Descriptive writing is what it sounds like: writing to describe. But a lot of writers end up reverting back to writing to tell, instead of taking the opportunity to paint a vivid picture, something that the reader can see in their mind’s eye. Writing to tell usually involves a lot of summary. So instead of describing the whinny and snuffle of a horse in a damp, misty field, the writer simply tells the reader what is happening, “Bill led the horse into the field”. Essentially, the how of the action is missed out. Every event, action, or descriptive moment in the plot has a how, and whereas telling often ignores this, good descriptive writing has to show this how. This is often the separation between good and bad writing. For example, “The rain was heavy” is quite a mundane way of telling the reader what the weather was, whereas a good descriptive passage involving the rain could create a dramatic and heart-wrenching mood.

What do you think of when you think of descriptive writing? For most people, smell, taste, touch, and hearing have far less to do with the visual or something one sees. Descriptive writing is essentially about creating a picture with words. A writer might describe a person, place, object, or even a memory of special significance. However, this is done on many levels and many elements need considering when a writer is choosing how to paint a picture of something.

By the end of this section, you should be able to: – Understand why writing descriptively is the core skill in all fiction writing. – Identify strengths and weaknesses in your own descriptive writing. – Understand and implement the basic techniques of good descriptive writing. – Be working on a piece of descriptive writing of your own.

5. Editing and Revising Techniques

Good news! By the end of revising, this will likely be the best part of your book. Now comes the hard part. Going through your book beginning to end can be grueling. Instead, try highlighting or underlining each sentence of the book. Assign each sentence a color based on quality. Red can mean awful, green can mean good, and blue can mean great. Now you can see your book’s quality through a different aspect. Since people tend to enjoy concluding events, here’s an effective revision method. Go through your book and revise the ending first. This may influence changes in the middle of the book, which you can then change. If you make changes in the middle of the book, don’t forget to reread those parts to check for mistakes. This is a pet peeve of mine, and I’m sure it’s many of yours as well, but make sure that your book is going smoothly. With experiences as tired as high school, time travel, or a bad knight attempting to redeem himself, the story has been overly used and chances are people will shun your book because of their past experiences with similar books. It may be a pain, but changing your story can be the best way to improve it.

How do you optimize your chances of crafting a winning novel? Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right. The hard part of writing a novel isn’t getting it on paper… it’s making your writing better. Begin revising by reading your book out loud. This will help you catch mistakes that you wouldn’t see by just reading it over. As you read, you might feel like large parts of your book are dreadful. This is normal. Don’t worry about fixing them yet, just highlight the bad areas and keep going. When you’re done, these areas might not seem as bad as they did the first time.