Finding Your Inner Author
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One of the ways to increase your creativity in writing is to begin with a story you are familiar with and have heard perhaps in your family. At family gatherings, be alert to the stories that are being told and see if you can glean a plot for your next story by adding embellishments.
Use the basic information and apply the type of writing you prefer to it to see if it could be a finished story with the changes you have made or are making. For example: If a child liked to play with a father’s keys you could have a nice mystery if the keys became missing. You could build on the mystery as you gave the details of where everyone looked, what actually or in your embellished version happened and how the story was solved.
Keep the details of the original version intact and use your embellished top this versions separate so you are keeping the family history in place as you are borrowing the basic story to embellish. Have fun and see what you can do as you are increasing your creativity in this manner.
When you are first starting to write, keep it simple and allow yourself to have immediate feedback that what you wrote was a success. I’m defining success as you started to write about a topic and finished your train of thought about that topic in one session. You will keep writing when you let yourself grow into longer and more involved plots, twists, turns and creative endings. Make it a point to begin short and grow into longer stories.
Apply this to any type of writing you want to try and soon you will be enjoying your writing more, you may also find yourself wanting to write more. Start with one or two areas first and then expand to other types of writing.
Give yourself a time to write and keep it to five minutes or under in the beginning. You can increase the time when you feel more comfortable with the shorter time. Try the mini writing sessions on every subject you can think of and see which areas seem to be of more interest to you. Turn it into a game and see if you can start and finish a story in under the five minute time. Put a timer on and when the timer goes off put your pencil down and the paper you wrote away. Allow yourself at least an hour before you go back and read what you wrote. You can take an additional five minute timed session to change the original if you want to do so. It may not need any additional changes. The objective here is to see if you can write about a topic and have a complete story in the mini time frame.
It can be so much fun to increase your writing skill doing it in these mini sessions. It keeps your project simple and you have to suspend your judgement because after all, you were timed and you only had five minutes. Your inner critic won’t have anything to grab onto so you can enjoy the process without the concern that it might not be approved by your inner critic then ultimately approved by others in your world. What a nice gift you can give to yourself while you are increasing your skill. Remember to have fun!