Start Where You Are
If you've wanted to start (or re-start) a creative writing practice, it can be daunting to face a blank page, the inner critic, and the uncertainty.
Read on for some tips, helpful mindsets, and prompts to start writing.
- To create a sustainable practice, we must be willing to start small.
- If you find yourself with nothing to do but wait for something, take out a little pocket notebook and jot some thoughts down.
- Send yourself an email or text.
- Carve out 15 to 20 minutes, get settled in a peaceful space and write. Treat your writing time as “me time".
Small moments like these built up over days, weeks, months, and years, tell your brain that you make space and time for writing, and that it is important to you. The more work you’ve done, the more your skill improves. There’s always something to learn, and you’ve already begun on that path. It feeds and builds that creative spark that you know you have inside.
The author of Welcome to the Writer’s Life, Paulette Perhach, describes the moment that pushed her to “just be a writer already”: after working for the Peace Corps in Paraguay, she was on the bus to her host family, and a woman gets on, cheerfully selling her own poems printed on stock paper. This prompted Perhach to commit to a writing practice. In her words:
“After seeing that poet on the bus, I stocked up on writing books in the Peace Corps library and, as they told me to, tried to write every single day no matter what. When I messed up, I yelled at myself in the way I thought necessary. Then, after some moping, I began again. I put my butt in the chair…and put words on the page. I failed again. I began again. I failed again. Began. I began to begin, over and over and over. In this way, I became an expert at beginning to be a dedicated writer. Here are my credentials: I’ve begun a thousand times…I shifted from wanting to be a writer to working to be a writer”
Helpful Prompts to Get Started
Begin now and begin again anytime you need to (no yelling at yourself necessary).
If you have five to ten minutes right now, grab the writing tool you prefer and get going with these prompts:
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Describe your favorite meal, from childhood, something you make, or receive from someone, in a way that will make your reader almost taste it.
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Write about the morning, what it means to you, how you feel about it, what your routine is, etc.
- From the book Room to Write, by Bonnie Goldberg: “Today write about the first time words profoundly affected you. Describe the situation, what led up to it, the moment of the encounter, your physical reaction, and something else that was taking place in the same setting but had nothing to do with your experience. Feel free to allow your imagination to supply whichever of these elements you can’t recall. You might try this as a poem.”
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