How To Develop a Creative Writing Practice

When we’re beginning our creative journey, either in writing, fine arts, or entrepreneurship, we will find ourselves researching “how to develop a creative writing practice”. It feels like the beginners route, which can feel daunting, or even disheartening. But taking the beginner's route is nothing to be ashamed of, in fact, we’re all beginners. Every day is new to us and we begin it fresh, unknowing, and unassuming. Working our way to success is no different. Every step of the way we are going to be beginners and when it comes to our creative writing practice, it’s no different.

Now, we’ve all had experience with creative writing. Whether this was in high school, or journaling, or already writing email blasts for your business, we all have something. So how does this make us beginners? Well, there’s a difference between doing some form of creative writing, and actually having a creative writing practice.

So what is a creative writing practice? A creative writing practice is the steps you take to develop high-quality creative writing content, and it starts at the beginning of your day. Your practice is not simply how or what you write, but it’s what you eat, how you stretch, and how you relax. All of the daily steps you take before and after you sit down to write are as important to your practice as the writing itself.

When you begin developing your creative writing practice, we recommend being truthful to the time you have in your day and what works for you. Trying to fit in unreasonable expectations will only hinder your practice. So don’t overwork yourself just for the sake of reaching success sooner, we guarantee it will have the opposite effect. The same goes for being true to yourself on what works for YOU! We all have odd quirks, and usually, these quirks can help us to focus, find our creative juices, and be our true, authentic selves.

Here is a look at one of our team's daily creative writing practices:

Wake up and say good morning to the plants

Stretch/do yoga

Eat a big breakfast

Take ADHD medication

Set timer for an hour and a half

Do finger stretches

Start writing

Alarm sounds

Get snack

Repeat alarm and snack and write routine until brain stops creating

Relax with a TV show or movie

As you can see, writing only happens a couple of times in the whole practice. This is totally normal, while the majority of the day laid out here involves writing, the act of writing is only part of the puzzle. Now, let's look at their writing practice:

Grab notebooks for all relevant writing topics

Begin handwritten brainstorm

Put all brainstorm info into organized google doc

Start writing

Research as needed

This is a little more in-depth of what their actual writing practice entails. As you can see, there’s more to it than simply writing. It is planning, researching, developing, organizing, AND writing. We recommend always brainstorming by hand, it gets the creative juices flowing and allows us to be messy in our ideas. Then, like our teammate, you can organize it all in a doc if needed.

What we have used as our examples are from a team member whose sole focus is writing. Often, our days do not allow for us to develop a writing practice that consists of the whole day, This is fine. But, if you know you write better when you drink a kiwi smoothie and have four oreos for breakfast, do it, even before you go to work. If you want to get writing as soon as you get home from running errands but find yourself more focused on the daily sales at Costco than you are on being creative, take a breath, and do what relaxes you. Relax, reset, then create. We’re all different, so we’re all going to have a practice that is slightly different from one another, but what’s important is that it works for us.

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