Effective writing advice for aspiring writers
You’ve gone to the next step: you now know what creative writing is. You’d like to get started in it. The inevitable question is… how?
For reference, look at Daily Writing Tips’ awesome article Creative Writing 101. There are quite a few steps given there. I will be adding my own touches to them.
So, without any further ado, here are the three steps for you to climb and emerge as victor (sorry, couldn’t resist it).
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What is creative writing? Is there a correct definition anywhere? That is what I hoped to find when I Googled the term “creative writing” a while back. But the answers were disappointing for me as a pure beginner, and puzzling. Here’s what is written as a definition for creative writing in Wikipedia:
“Creative writing is considered to be any writing, fiction, poetry, or non-fiction, that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, and technical forms of literature. Works which fall into this category include novels, epics, short stories, and poems. Writing for the screen and stage, screenwriting and playwriting respectively, typically have their own programs of study, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
First of all, if you only just came here, you might want to check out the first and second parts of this article for more information.
And next, without any further ado:
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Does the edit-as-you-go method work? Or does it not? Is it the best method out there, or the worst? If it does work, for whom does it and for whom it doesn’t?
It works, yes. But only for a few people. There are many people for whom it does not work. What they do:
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In the first part of this post I started explaining about The Big Picture of a Novel. In the second part I will start the process of how to actually be aware about it.
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For me, writing a novel isn’t the same as writing the short story. The two are very very different, and that’s not for me. That’s saying for everyone.
Writing a short story of 1000-2000 words means you don’t have to worry about the big picture. You just write a gripping event which happened one day and that’s it. You don’t have to worry about the time span your story has either. Writing a short story is certainly easier in that respect. However… there are certain other problems related with it, about which I’m going to inform you in another post.
Back to this post, as I was saying, it’s all different with a novel. There are chapters in a novel, and you can’t write disconnected, disjointed chapters. Your readers will throw your book away if they find it’s very episodic. If you want to write in an episodic style, try the short story then!
So you have to worry about the Big Picture. Find where your chapters are leading to. Find whether they’re leading to the place you want them to lead, or whether they are disobeying you (for a want of a better word). And that is not as easy as it looks. But hey, if this is overwhelming to you, remember that all this stuff is not impossible! Thousands of writers have done this thing. If you like writing, you have to do it. I also have to do it. If there’s one thing that is important for a beginning writer, it’s this: whenever you find a thing that seems just way too difficult, take a break. And then determine to do it. After all, other writers have done the same thing too.
So is writing a novel as easy as it looks? Definitely not! What I have told you is only the teaser. There’s still a lot of stuff left to tell.
Which means this post will have to be cut in parts.
Read part two | part three