To improve your creative writing, widen what you know, break your usual patterns, look for fresh metaphors, use dialogue to reveal your characters, and give every scene a purpose. The 5 tips below explain each one.
Sometimes, even when you enjoy writing, you can't help feeling that you have hit a creative wall. You can still write, but everything looks the same, without a hint of improvement. It happens to every writer, so don't worry about it too much. These simple tips help you move forward.
How to improve your creative writing
There are no hard rules for how to start creative writing or how to get better at it, but there are some useful tips you can follow. Here are 5 of them.
1. Read, learn, and ask
Widening your horizons is a must if you want to improve your creative writing. Try writing about something you know nothing about yet. Read books and watch films as you research the new subject, and ask around in online forums when you have questions.
Learning new things enriches what you already know and lets you see things from different points of view.
2. Step out of the box
People tend to do things in the same pattern again and again. It happens unconsciously, so they rarely notice it. The problem is that your readers may get bored with the pattern, and your stories become predictable.
The easiest way to break out of your shell is to write a short story while strictly following another writer's style. It is challenging, but stick with it. Doing things differently makes you a more versatile writer, and your writing becomes richer for it. For more ideas, try these creative writing exercises.
3. Use fresh metaphors and analogies
Stop using the old, tired metaphors and analogies you learned at school. For a lesson in what a comparison can do, look at the deliberately bad analogies that readers sent to humor contests such as the Washington Post's Style Invitational. Here are some examples:
- The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.
- He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
- The dandelion swayed in the gentle breeze like an oscillating electric fan set on medium.
- John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
They are bad on purpose, but they show how much an unexpected comparison catches the reader's attention, and how flat a lazy one falls. Idioms and metaphors explains how these figures of speech work.
4. Take advantage of dialogue
Dialogue can reveal a character's traits and nature while it moves the plot forward. Sloppy dialogue, however, only adds clutter. To avoid that, make sure your readers always know who is talking: give each speaker a paragraph of their own, and use speech tags where they are needed.
Make the dialogue believable, too. Some people stutter, speak broken English, use slang, or even talk in fragments. Tips for writing dialogue goes into more detail.
5. Make a scene
Every scene in your writing must have a purpose. Why does the main character cry? Does he miss his dog? Or is it because he can't take back what he just said? As you describe the scene, keep its purpose in mind at all times.
Show your readers how the scene adds to the development of the character. After all, if a scene doesn't add anything, why write it in the first place?
Keep practicing
Those are a few simple ways to improve your creative writing. Keep practicing, and perhaps one day you will win a creative writing competition with your work.
When you do enter a writing competition, proofread your work thoroughly before you submit it. Don't let a story go to waste because of a typo you could have caught: one last check with the Spell Checker and one last careful read are worth the time.