Tips for Improving Your Creative Writing

Creative Writing Tips

So you're trying to write a creative piece of fiction, and you find yourself dissatisfied with your work. What could be wrong with it? Could it be the dialogue? The plot? There could be any number of reasons.

There are a lot of little errors made in creative fiction that can take a reader away from the experience. Immersion should be one of the main goals in a creative piece, sinking the reader into the world you're building for them.

Little things like grammatical errors or stilted dialogue can immediately take your audience out of the story and back into their world, too distracted by puzzling sentence structure or indecipherable action sequences to focus on the actual tale you're trying to tell. So how can you fix it? There are many Training & Learning Centres available in our directory where you will find web content writing courses online to improve your writing skills.

Think Out Loud sentences that don't make much grammatical sense at all. If you aren't sure if a sentence is coherent, say it aloud. This goes especially for dialogue. A conversation should flow in ways that people actually speak to one another, and if you aren't sure you're accomplishing that, read the entire interaction aloud.

Does it sound like two people speaking to one another? Or does it sound like two aliens pretending to be humans? (This does not apply to conversations between aliens, obviously).

If it sounds odd to your ear, rework it, saying the entire conversation aloud until it sounds pleasing to you. It's probably best to do this step at home, lets you attract some odd gazes for having an entire conversation with yourself.

Mind Your Tenses

If your sentence begins with one tense and ends with another, it will read as though you lost your train of thought halfway through. This goes for paragraphs as well. Try to keep your actions either as past or present tense throughout your piece, unless there is a marked change in the story that would make the change in tense make sense.

For example, "Susan has no idea if she was going to be fired or demoted today" sounds much better if we change everything to the past tense. "Susan had no idea if she was going to be fired or demoted today" flows a lot better.

An easy way of remembering which tense you're using is to imagine how your story is taking place- are you telling it as it's happening? Or are you cataloging the events like a historian, telling the audience about something that's already happened? Read It Over- And do it at least three times, editing something every single time. Read it over like you would a new audience member looking at it with fresh eyes, and if it helps, walk away from the piece between readings.

Your first draft may Sound new and exciting and amazing as you're writing it, but upon a second viewing you may find more than a few errors. If your piece is exceptionally long, read it over at least once in its entirety and edit as you go, then focus on smaller parts of your work to save on time.

It's difficult to set aside the time to edit something that might be the length of a novel, but it's worth it to sit down and read your work entirely at least twice to make sure everything reads like one piece instead of several smaller pieces f writing mashed into one.

Think Cinematically

Thinking of your story less as a written piece and more as a mini-movie that will play in your reader's heads can help with envisioning movement in your story. If you were watching your story as a movie, how would the characters move? What would it look like from an outsider's point of view? Even if we're putting ourselves in the shoes of the main character, there should be an expectation of realistic movement that makes sense to the audience.

This can help immensely if you're trying to describe a particularly difficult action sequence, or a difficult movement on a character's part. Thinking cinematically can also help if you're having trouble with building the environment in your story.

How do you want things to look? Do you have a clear aesthetic or feeling in mind? Thinking as if you're a director behind a camera can help set the scene for your audience and can help you build the scene you want. How would you decorate a movie set for this part of the story? How would you light it? 

So with all that being said, learning and mastering your writing skills will lead you to a specific field where you will find yourself as the Creative content writer for a company with high salary.