How to be a good writer pt. 4

Maintaining Your Creativity

Keep a notebook and pen with you at all times

Good ideas have a tendency to appear when you least expect them. Keeping a notebook and pen near you at all times allows you to capture ideas as they occur to you. It’s not just ideas that you might want to capture though. You may feel that you have phrases or descriptions in your head of the place you’re in at any point in time and you can use the notebook to help capture the sounds, smells and sights of wherever you are to help you relive the moment when you come to write. You will have to train yourself to use it though, especially if you’ve never operated this way. Just trying to rely on your memory will inevitably see you forget some of the ideas you have and you never know which ones could have turned out to be valuable.

Keep a cuttings library.

Just like the notebook idea, it’s useful to keep a cuttings library. Whenever you’re reading your daily newspaper or just surfing the web you’ll find yourself tripping across articles, news items or pictures that

evoke thoughts or ideas for articles of your own or settings, plots and themes for your writing. Keep a copy of the item and stick it into a file or a scrapbook with some notes of what occurred to you at the time.

You never know when that little acorn of thought might sprout into something much larger.

Take a look at Organising Yourself to Write for more information.

Use a camera to capture the moment

Being a writer doesn’t mean you can’t use another medium to help you. In conjunction with your notebook and cuttings library keeping pictures can help spur and maintain your creativity. Being a writer doesn’t mean you can’t use another medium…

Digital cameras are everywhere nowadays and usually quite cheap, so why not carry one with you. You can snap away whenever you find yourself in a place or  situation that’s giving you ideas and you’ll have a visual record to look back on. 

Mobile or cell phones are particularly useful for this, as most come with both still picture and video functions on them nowadays. Create a folder somewhere on your computer or network and have a digital photo and video library to supplement your cuttings library and notebook.

Keep watching people. 

Have you ever stopped to just watch people and the world go by? If you have, there’s a good chance that it’s occurred to you already what good sources of inspiration other people can be. Whether it’s the things they say, the things they do or just their mannerisms and appearance, you’d be surprised how much inspiration you can get just from people-watching. This can be particularly helpful in setting up scenes where people interact or in building the subtle details around a character in a story. 

Don’t stress about the title before you’ve even started.

Many would-be authors make the mistake of stressing about the title of their unfinished work while they’re writing it. The truth is that during the drafting stages, the title of a work in progress is largely irrelevant. It’s 

far better to leave the title until the work is either completely finished or almost there. It’s much more likely
that you’ll have some good ideas of what the title could be as you become more intimate with your own
storyline, subject or theme.
Apart from the obvious interference in your train of thought that worrying about a title will result in, a publisher or editor is likely to suggest that the title is changed if you’re lucky enough to reach the publication stage – so you’re anxiety would be for nothing.