Creative Writing - 5 Top Ways To Rejuvenate Your Creative Writing Starting Today

Writer's block is a widely known phenomenon amongst writers, when you feel completely stuck, out of ideas, and wondering not where the next book or poem or chapter will come from, but where the next SENTENCE will come from.

It's times like this when your creative writing feels in need of a serious boost of energy and inspiration, something to rejuvenate it to the kind of levels you've produced before, and can do again.

So here are 5 top ways to give your writing a new lease of life. You can start putting them into action today:

1. Experiment with some creative writing prompts. Prompts simply provide a starting point for your writing, a new direction to head in that you might not have tried before. Once you get started, your writing is all your own, you're free to create and write in whichever way it takes you. That initial prompt gives the little boost you need to get the creative writing ideas flowing once more.

2. Start small and keep it short. Often we expect to be able to write 3 new chapters of our novel a day when the reality is we're struggling to string more than a couple of words together. This expectation is only making the block more painful. Instead put all major projects to one side, pick something small, different and experimental, and see where it leads. After building confidence with a few of these short projects, work up to larger more ambitious ones again.

3. Start an ideas journal. The easiest way to keep creative ideas flowing to you like Niagara Falls is to capture them as soon as they come. Use an ideas journal to write down ideas when they appear. The more ideas you write down and capture, the more will appear. Your ideas journal will soon be overflowing with a diverse collection of new writing ideas you can't wait to explore.

4. Detach from the outcome. When you're focused on the "end product" of what you're writing and trying to come up with something perfect, it's easy to lose sight of the enjoyment of writing. Pick a new project and have no expectation of how it will turn out. Simple write freely, whatever comes to you. You'll come up with some gems of ideas as well as reconnecting with the pure enjoyment and adventure of writing freely and easily.

5. Take a few creative field trips. Visit places you've always wanted to, or places full of inspiration that stimulate your senses. Whether this for you is a walk into the depths of a forest, or a trip to an art gallery or bookshop, you'll be surrounded with ideas and new possible directions in which to write. Take your ideas journal (see tip 3) to record all your ideas for future development.

These are 5 top tips to help rejuvenate your creative writing, starting today. Which one are you going to start using first?

Creative Writing Exercises - Unleash Your Writing Abilities With Creative Writing Exercises

When you feel your writing is starting to become a struggle or the dreaded symptoms of writer's block are descending upon you, it's easy to panic.

But all writers have peaks and lulls in their writing, we can't be writing at our very best every time we sit down to create.

The secret is not to feel that when your writing's getting a little sticky it means you're about to enter a huge block that will last months or years, or that you'll never be able to write anything of any worth ever again.

A great technique to help you do this is to have a store of creative writing exercises and prompts close to hand.

Writing exercises and prompts can help give you that spark of inspiration when you feel you're lacking any.

Writing exercises also help you to explore new ways and directions of writing that you might not have tried before. The more experienced you become as a writer, the better, the richer and the more rewarding your writing becomes, both to you as the writer, and to your readers.

So why don't more writers use writing exercises?

The main issue is that we feel they are somehow a short cut to creating. We feel that when we write it should be completely 100% our own work, and by using a writing exercise or prompt as starting point, we're somehow cheating.

This simply isn't the case. Imagine you're a chef who's just starting out. You have a natural love of food and understand how different flavours combine and enhance each other.

But you haven't cooked many different dishes and want to gain more experience. You'd like to start with a lasagna but you've never made one before, and you're not even sure what all the necessary ingredients are. What you could do is gather together a huge range of ingredients and simply experiment by throwing together different flavours and seeing what develops. This might be a lot of fun for a while but it will take you a long time to find combinations that work well and you're likely to get frustrated in the process.

The alternative is to start with a basic recipe. So you find a few recommended lasagna recipes, see what the common ingredients are and try cooking them yourself.

Then, once you have the basic form of the dish mastered, you can begin to add your own little flourishes and secret ingredients, to make it your unique lasagna dish. If you didn't start with those basic recipes as a guideline and were simply guessing what went into a tasty lasagna, you might have taken weeks and dozens of wasted attempts to get even close to a delicious lasagna.

It's similar with writing.

Creative writing exercises provide a recipe, a framework to get you going in a new direction you might not have tried before.

Once you start and understand the technique, you're completely free to experiment with it, evolve it into your own style and writing voice.

There may be exercises you enjoy so much they become one of your most trusted and reliable ways of writing creatively. There may be other methods you try that you don't really enjoy or don't suit your writing aims and style. Either way, each time you try a new writing exercise, you return to your writing a wiser, more experienced writer, and writing will come far more easily to you. And that can only be a good thing.

So use some creative writing exercises today and unleash those writing abilities in you just waiting to be discovered.

Creative Writing Prompts, Creative Writing Exercises And How To Electrify Your Writing!

Lately you've felt like you've been writing the same words, phrases and paragraphs over and over, without any fresh direction or ideas. So you're looking for ways to juice up your writing, make it more stimulating, enjoyable and interesting.

Creative writing prompts and exercises are a fantastic way to give your writing that boost you've been looking for.

The problem most of us who write have with using writing prompts or writing exercises is we feel it's somehow cheating or a shortcut.

I'm sure you've probably felt this yourself at some time: "If I use someone else's prompt or exercise, then it's not my writing. What kind of writer can't come up with their own words and ideas?!"

Well, it's not quite so simple as that. Here's why:

Imagine you want to play some music. You have electricity running to your house, and you have a CD. But you don't just go and hold the CD against the electricity socket on your wall and expect to hear music!

Or you want to make some toast. So you get out a couple of slices of bread, put them on your kitchen worktop near an electrical socket and hope when you return a few minutes later the bread has become toast. It's never going to happen!

In both of these situations there's a crucial missing link. You have raw power - the electricity. You have the raw material, in these examples the CD of music, and the slices of bread. But what's missing is a way to channel the electricity in a meaningful and useable way to allow the raw material to become what you want it to become.

That's what your CD player and your toaster are for.

So how does this apply to your creative writing?

The situation is very similar. You have the raw power in the form of your writing talent and potential. You have the raw material, the words and letters. What you need now is a way to channel that raw power to shape the letters and words into something meaningful, something useful.

Creative writing prompts and exercises are a great way of doing this. They give you that channel, that conduit you need to allow your writing talent to create wonderful formations and sequences of words. If you don't have that initial prompt or exercise as a way to channel your writing talent, it's just going to sit there inside you doing nothing. In the same way electricity just sits there waiting in the sockets. It doesn't start flowing until something is plugged in and switched on.

So plug in and switch on your creative writing today by using prompts and exercises!

Creative Writing Prompts - How To Use Prompts To Help Your Creative Writing Flourish

So you want to become a better creative writer? But you feel short of ideas, lacking in inspiration, and just don't know where to start your next piece of writing. You know deep down that you have a lot of potential as a writer, you enjoy writing and have written pieces in the past that you've been proud of.

But lately, the words are just not coming. What can you do?

Creative writing prompts are one of the best ways to get your creative juices flowing and unlock all that untapped potential.

A writing prompt is simply a word, phrase, picture or idea to stimulate your creativity and start you writing. Where you go with your writing after that is entirely up to you, the prompt just gives you that little push, that glimmer of inspiration you've had difficulty finding lately.

Many writers feel that using a writing prompt might be cheating or taking a short cut, and means you're not producing work that's all yours. Remember, the prompt is just a starting point. YOUR unique creativity does the rest.

Think of using writing prompts like this:

Imagine there's a huge wonderful garden, every last square inch heaving with the most gorgeous and bountiful blooms. There are many different areas within that garden, each with their own theme and design.

For example, there's the Victorian English garden, the dense tropical Amazonian rainforests, the Dutch tulip fields of every colour imaginable, and the sweeping majesty of the undiscovered Alaska. If you looked hard enough, you'd probably even find the hanging gardens of Babylon!

It's a big garden! Infinitely big in fact.

All around this glorious garden is a 20 foot high brick wall, with a gate every few metres or so. You can just about see enough through the gates to know there's plenty to be explored inside, but they're all locked and there seems no way of opening them.

Then, you realise, just beside each gate is a little red box. You open the box and inside is a key. The key for the gate, the key to entering this incredible garden. You take the key, open the gate, and you're in, off on your adventure...

So, how does this relate to writing prompts and being afraid to use them because they're not all your own, or because you feel you're cheating?

A creative writing prompt is the key to the garden. It's not the actual garden.

The garden is already within you. It's all the amazing, rich and emotive stories, poems, songs and novels you haven't yet written but are perfectly capable of writing. Use a creative writing prompt, take the key that's been offered, and start to explore that wonderful creative garden within you... You, and your future audience, deserve to experience that garden in its fullest bloom...

Creative Writing Secrets - Have More Ideas Than You Thought Possible For Your Creative Writing

One of the biggest obstacles to writing consistently and freely is not having enough ideas. If you felt you had plenty of ideas to work with and to develop, then writing would be exciting and motivating and become the pleasure and adventure it should be. Trying to write without any ideas to develop is like trying to build a house without any bricks.

They're the raw material you need to build upon. A lack of ideas leads inevitably to a lack of confidence in your creativity. When you feel you never have any ideas, you write less often. And the less often your write, the more difficult it is when you DO come to write.

So how can you generate more ideas out of thin air? The answer is you don't need to. The problem lies not with the fact that you don't HAVE enough ideas. The problem is you don't CAPTURE enough ideas.

If you have nothing in place to record your ideas as they come to you, then they don't hang around, they just evaporate as quickly as they came, leaving you with that frustrating "just out of your grasp" feeling where you know you had a great idea, you just haven't a clue what it was! When you use an ideas journal or an ideas book - which can be just a simple pocket notebook you carry with you at all times to jot down your ideas - you give out a very strong message to your creative mind.

The signs you're emitting are saying "All ideas welcome here! Come inside - hot meal and cosy, comfortable bed provided. Stay as long as you like. All travellers welcome..."

You gain a reputation for being somewhere that ideas are valued and taken care of, given shelter from the cold outside. And the more ideas you capture, the more ideas you attract.

Before, by not capturing your ideas, you were like a hotel out in the middle of nowhere with no signs. Hardly anyone knew you were there, and the odd idea that did happen to stumble across your door was turned away back into the cold, neglected and unwanted. This whole concept comes down to giving your creative mind PERMISSION to be creative, allowing yourself to have a constant flow of ideas.

If you went to a hotel where you were welcomed in like a long lost family member returning home, and genuinely made to feel like this was a place you could stay and be happy for as long as you wanted, you'd recommend it to your friends, wouldn't you?

That's what happens when you use an ideas journal or notebook, the ideas are welcomed in, they tell their friends, more ideas come, and in a short space of time your hotel is thriving with all sorts of wonderful creative ideas, all intermingling and sparking off even more ideas.

So start using a writing ideas journal today.

It's the secret to having all the creative ideas you'll ever need, and could well be the best action you've take to stimulate your creative writing in a long time.