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Getting started as a creative writer

It's writing o'clock. Your day gets better because you are going to tell your story. Writing is your passion so you want to make the most out of it. But first you need to take some things into account. Well yes, to become a writer you need to write, right. But you also need other factors that influence your work like… deciding to follow all the right advices about focus and prevent get blocked by distractions.

So, let’s start from scratch. Remember the first thing a writer need is inspiration. What inspires you the most? What turns your soul on fire? What do you want to talk about, but you don’t know how? If you don’t have a clue, then start writing ideas, words, examples, anything. Think about your passions. Those tiny things that moves you. Your past. Or someone else’s story. An amazing travel story you had back then when you were backpacking around south east asia. It’s important that you know the “what”: what are you going to write about; but also the Why. A writer without inspiration and direction is just a writer writing about banal things, not a creative writer.

After a few hours of brainstorming, or reading, or writing down some ideas, you finally got it. You found the subject that makes you feel like you can write about it forever. So the next step is getting the style you would like to use. There are many ways of getting an style… but my deepest recommendation is that you should READ, and read a lot. Read the most you can. Specially fiction. People say reading improves your writing, and it’s eternally true. Not just because you become aware of grammar mistakes and new vocabulary, but also because the more you read the faster you find your style, and the faster you discover new ways of telling the same things in many different ways with different words. Getting to know other writers personalities through their stories, make you identify yourself with yours.

Now you have the style, so we move to the tone... It’s the moment to unleash the inner creative writer within you. Let the power of your imagination flow and don’t let that inspiration goes away. You need constancy. And if suddenly you get stuck, don’t get frustrated. Stop, breath and continue the next day. Don’t resist it. Don’t hold it back. Most of our obstacles are in our mind, and we are the ones preventing ourselves to keep going forward. Inspiration isn’t something that just disappears. Sometimes it can get blocked, but when is real, it prevails through time and space: after all, great stories, great novels are not written in a single day.