photo credit: Jonathan Shield
When Olympic athletes go out onto the field, it’s the culmination of many years of hard work, endurance, dreaming, and working to build up the appropriate muscles to win at the chosen sport.
Those who want to succeed at creative writing will need the same dedication, persistence, and hard work. Athletes always stretch and warm up the physical muscles before attempting to win the race, throw the javelin, or complete the highest jump in the world.
You too, can stretch and warm up your brain in order to encourage the creative juices to start flowing.
There are many ways you can stretch your skills as a creative writer. You can practice your craft, accept new challenges, give yourself time to dream, put in the hard yards, persist even when it is difficult, create games that stretch your creativity, create unnecessary or ‘fun’ writing, and work to perfect your trade skills. All of these activities will encourage your creativity and will help you to stretch your creative habits to become a better writer.
Here are some of my favourite ways to stretch and warm up my mental muscles, before I sit down to write:
- Complete some physical exercise. This gets the body and mind energised because of the increased blood flow and circulation to the brain.
- Find a new word in the dictionary and practice using it in three different sentences. This helps to get my mind focused on the art of writing, and gives me a quick warm up activity that also increases my vocabulary.
- Read an interesting article in a newspaper or magazine and spend a few minutes thinking about I would have written a similar article.
- Play a word game that gets me thinking about how words go together.
- Write something just for fun. For example, a writer friend and I are currently writing a short story, one paragraph at a time. She writes a paragraph and sends it to me, and then I write one. Joining a writing group and doing similar activities can be a great way to flex and warm up your mental muscles. It also makes you remember that writing is meant to be a fun, creative activity.
Besides stretching to warm up before sitting down to write, I also like to stretch my creative habits in general by:
- Being willing to accept new challenges from clients, by writing on topics I either don’t know much about or may find difficult to write about. Accepting challenges helps to develop writing skills in different ways and stretches your ability, so that next time it is not nearly so difficult. I love to work to improve as a writer.
- Work to develop my writing skills, by constant proofreading, checking, and editing. Finding a variety of synonyms to use, so that the same words are not used every paragraph can develop my writing skills. I challenge myself to make every piece of writing interesting for the intended audience.
- Spend time practicing the art of creative writing. Although you may not quite forget how to ride a bike, you find you are able to ride further, quicker, and enjoy it more when you ride regularly. The same thing happens with creative writers, the more you write, the better you get at perfecting your craft.
There are so many ways to stretch and expand your writing abilities and your skill in tapping into the creative aspect of writing. See what ideas work best for you, and then work to stretch your creative habits. Enjoy your creative writing!
This is the last article in the CREATIVE HABITS series, as we have explored S=Stretch Yourself. I hope you have enjoyed it and been able to use some of my tips in your infopreneurial and writing endeavours.
I’m not sure what I’ll be writing about next – I might just write randomly about my thoughts and experiences as I continue down the creativity path. A bit like a cork bobbing about in the water letting the currents take me on some exciting new adventure. Or maybe not. You’ll just have to stayed tuned….
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