Creative Writing Ideas

A great creative writer is one who can keep their readers totally involved and engrossed with their writing.

Whether you plan on writing the next award winning best-seller, a storybook for kids, a screenplay or some poetry, creative writing takes an investment of your time and personality to be successful.

Don't kid yourself that it's easy, but it can be fun.

Creative storytelling is a skill that the best authors work on constantly. Ideas can present themselves at any time or place so it is important to be prepared. Never be caught without a notepad and pen or a voice recording device to hand. The perfect inspiration for your writing can strike you at the oddest moments and if you don't write it down or record it at the time it may slip away.

Don't spend hours staring at an empty page. Whether you use your laptop to write or you prefer to write the old-fashioned way with a notebook and pencil, just write something as soon as you sit down to start writing. Even if the first pages you write are not good at all, any sort of writing will build the creative muscle and writing that nobody except you will read is great practice.

One way to become a good writer is simply to write a lot. Your first stories may just be short pieces that nobody will read. Push yourself just to write something, anything for the sake of it. Take an idea you have for a character and write a description of the person; what do they look like, what do they wear, what do they eat, when were they born and what was the world like then. These short pieces may form the basis of a longer piece of writing or even a novel, or they may just be useful practice.

Every word, sentence or paragraph you write is a step in the right direction of your creative writing career. If all else fails just look out of a window and write what you can see. A good part of writing creatively is describing things, people or places whether you do this by dialogue or descriptive text.

Hone your creative writing skills by daily practice and you will soon find both the quality of your writing and the amount of content you can produce will increase accordingly.

If you find it difficult or stressful to come up with unique ideas for your creative writing, you are not alone. Even the most prolific writers probably don't find it easy to think of original ideas. When you think about it this is hardly surprising as the number of books of fiction that have been written and published runs into millions. How can a writer possibly think of an idea that has not been written about countless times before?

Of course you could decide to write purely fantasy about an imaginary world with characters that can be or do anything your imagination can come up with. However, if you prefer to write about real, if fictional people in our real world there are still ways for you to find original plot ideas and characters.

Current events in the news or on TV are a source of ideas. Reading about people's lives in magazines can give you inspiration for new characters. If it helps think about how you would do things differently if you were in their shoes. Watching a few of the shows on daytime TV could open your eyes to many real life situations that you would never have believed could actually happen. Looking at their story from a different perspective can change the outcome altogether and could be the basis of a great plot idea.

Another idea for a brainstorming session is to write down a list of great opening lines. You can research these from books you own yourself or find some online. Take the great opening line of your choice and turn it into a unique story.

Human relationships form the basis of many novels. This can be the relationship between lovers, friends, families or people at war with each other. The relationship that builds up between a group of strangers forced to spend time together at work, school, as prisoners or in a traumatic situation such as a natural or man-made disaster can create an infinite number of possibilities for a story.

Truly creative writing involves thinking "outside the box". Taking an idea and putting a twist on it to make it original. However, you can think too much about a new project and end up with writer's block and stagnation. Learning to get your ideas down as fast as possible is a valuable skill. Write some pages then forget about them for a few days. When you look back at these pages you may find they are no good at all; they have some good ideas but need rewriting or they are just right and can be used as they are.

If you are really struggling to come up with ideas for your writing you may find that using creative writing prompts will help you. There are plenty of these prompts to be found online; in fact there are whole websites dedicated to offering this service to writers.

These prompts can just be a few words, a sentence or an outline of an idea to spur your own creativity into action. Having a supply of prompts you can look at when you simply cannot think of anything to write about can be a great way to get out of feeling stuck. Just choose one and start writing. The very use of prompts invites your own imagination to create new methods of including different ideas in your writing. Having fun while exploring these new ideas and techniques expands your ability to create by yourself.

Experimenting with your creative writing skills and techniques can only improve your results and the easier you make it for yourself to write, the less pressured and stressed you will feel. This can make you a more relaxed, productive and happy writer.