Whether you’re brainstorming your first story or publishing your ninth book, there comes a point when all writers wonder the same thing. Is there a better way to approach the page?
We’re always hunting for creative writing tips in the hope of gaining insight into fresh ideas, practical techniques, or new ways to approach our writing process. You can analyze great books to help strengthen your skills, but the best tips never ask you to write like someone else. The best tips help you understand how you write.
In this article, I’ll explore creative writing tips, why they work for some writers and not for others. Lastly I’ll give you a Story Weapon on how you can use them to sharpen your own creative process.
The most useful creative writing tips aren’t rules but observations meant to help writers understand their own process rather than imitate someone else’s. This guide covers five: approaching drafts with a beginner’s mind, trusting the personal rituals that unlock your flow, writing what genuinely scares you, reading with a writer’s curiosity about why something works, and giving yourself permission to write poorly in a first draft. Perfectionism, more than any lack of skill, is what blocks discovery.
“Which tips should I follow?”
You’ve probably heard tips like these before:
- Write every day
- Carry a notebook
- Read more books
- Outline your story
As a writer, you’ll come across hundreds, maybe even thousands of creative writing tips like these. Some may even seem contradictory.
While some writers say that planning ahead and outlining is key to finishing your story, others say it can restrict your creativity. One writer suggests writing to music to let your inspiration flow. Another shares that complete silence is what helps them focus on their character’s voices.
If all of these tips work, how can they all be right? The answer is in the word tip.
Creative writing tips aren’t law. They aren’t even rules. They’re just observations from different writers on what’s worked for them. They observed that a particular approach successfully coaxed something out of their writing and decided to share it. Another writer followed a completely different path and shared that instead.
Neither of them is wrong. And neither is trying to define the only way to unlock creativity in writing.
What creative writing tips really accomplish
Creative writing tips offer possibilities. They all assume one thing: the ability to write creatively already exists within you.
These tips don’t exist to inject you with creativity or take over your writing process. They offer you different choices and potential approaches to your own creativity. Their purpose is to help you discover the conditions that allow your own voice and ideas to emerge more consistently.
Creative writing tips give your imagination more opportunities to speak and be shared.
#1 – A Beginner’s Mind
Remember, you are an artist. You are not building widgets. There is no formula to creating a story, only principles. Every writer has their own interests, experiences, and instincts when they craft their stories. You may even discover that what worked beautifully for one project doesn’t work for the next.
Approach your work with a sense of curiosity and delight. Approach it from a place of “not knowing” so that it can speak to you. Approach it with a beginner’s mind.
Your job, particularly in the first draft, is to trust the story that is coming to you. Trust the world. Trust the characters. Remain curious, and hold it all loosely. Resist the urge to start writing too soon. Allow yourself to start to see a beginning, middle, and end, but don’t let any of it get set in concrete. By doing this, you will discover that your idea of your story is never the whole story. It’s not that your idea is incorrect, but that it is incomplete. This truth can be both humbling and liberating.
Remember this: You are not the author, you are the channel for the story that wants to be told through you.
You’ve probably heard the adage, “Write what you know.” Many beginning writers take this literally to mean you should only write about what you’ve personally experienced.
#2 – Trust your process
Here is a different interpretation from Ursula K. Le Guin: “Write what you know. But remember that you know dragons.”
Try thinking back to times when it felt like your words flowed naturally onto the page and scenes unfolded easily. Decisions that you had to make for a story were easily answered.
Now compare that with a time when the words felt like you had to force them, when crafting a story felt more like drudgery. Every writer struggles sometimes. It comes with the territory. But trying to root out what distracts you and find what boosts your imagination can help.
Maybe the best scenes appear for you late at night. The prolific novelist, Michael Chabon raised four children with his wife, Ayalet Waldman, and so he wrote from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m while everyone else was asleep.
I heard once that Neil Young only records under a full moon. If he must, he will record on other days, but he always schedules his recording sessions around the moon cycle, because he says that is when he feels most attuned to his creativity.
Do you find your flow more easily when you’re snuggled up on the couch or surrounded by the quiet buzz of a cafe? Perhaps you fill a notebook with meticulous details you’ve observed as you go about your day.
Do you have a preferred time to write, a specific place, rituals, habits, totems? Trust these. They don’t have to make sense. Human beings are not logical creatures. Storytelling is a primal act. Make a list of your ideal writing process and allow yourself to move in the direction of embodying it.
Over time, these observations will become more valuable than a long list of tips because they are rooted in your own experience. As you go over the tips in this article, keep this mindset. Think of every tip as an experiment. Some will fit naturally into the way you work, while others might spark an entirely new approach.
#3 – Write what scares you
I once told a writing teacher I wasn’t sure what story I should write next.
“Write the one that scares you most,” she said. “That’s where the energy is.”
Sometimes we play it safe. We write what we think the “marketplace” will respond to, or the idea that our agent likes, or our boyfriend or girlfriend thinks is sweet.
Write the thing that excites you, maybe even terrifies you. Write the thing that is going to push you out of your comfort zone. Write the thing that you think nobody will want to read.
Imagine if two writers stood before you and said the following:
Writer #1: “I just wrote something that is really great.”
Writer #2: “I just wrote something that I am really scared to reveal.”
Which writer do you want to read?
#4 – Read like a writer
The very talented screenwriter and filmmaker Anthony Minghella once said that while he hadn’t seen very many movies, the ones he had seen, he had studied voraciously. I think this notion applies to writers as well.
While reading is essential for any writer, the real value comes from being a reader who explores with curiosity. When a scene or a character captures your attention, pause for a moment. Why did it work? Was it the pacing? The dialogue? Or maybe the atmosphere set by the narrator? Is it genre fiction? Did the author mix genres, or do something unusual that you have never seen before? How did this land for you? What did you read that excited you, that got your blood pumping, that made you see the world in a new way?
The same applies to stories that lose your interest. Again, ask why.
Remember, your goal isn’t to copy another writer’s style. It’s recognizing the decisions that strengthen the narrative. Don’t just be a better reader, sharpen your instincts to notice storytelling choices that resonate with your own creative instincts.
#5 Permission to write poorly
Perfectionism is one of the worst enemies of creative writing.
You will be tempted to edit, polish, and rewrite long before you finish your manuscript. You might question every paragraph, or pressure yourself into producing chapters that read like an already finished novel.
Perfectionism doesn’t just slow your progress. It blocks you from discovery. Let your characters surprise you, and allow new unexpected ideas to appear.
If you demand great things immediately from every sentence, those discoveries won’t come to light.
An imperfect draft is still moving forward. A story left unwritten in favor of perfection doesn’t have the chance to grow and evolve. One of the most productive things a writer can do is keep going, trusting that revision will give them other opportunities to refine their work later.
Your story weapon: There is only one you
My story weapon here is simple: There is only one you. Trust that. Trust your voice. Let it be raw, let it be sloppy, don’t worry about the grammar, punctuation or syntax. Screw everything you learned in fourth grade English. I wrote a paper in college that was dangerous and irreverent and I got a C+.
I wore it as a badge.
Being a writer requires a strange mixture of humility and defiance. You must possess both. You must have the humility to know when you’re hearing the truth, and the defiance to know when someone simply does not get what you are doing. If you don’t confuse the two, and you keep writing, you will become a force to be reckoned with.
The most valuable creative writing tips are the ones that help you better understand your own creative process rather than asking you to imitate someone else’s. As you continue developing your craft, focus on discovering the techniques that bring out your strongest work. To deepen your understanding of story structure, character, and the writing process, learn more about storytelling craft in The 90-Day Novel, The 90-Day Memoir, or The 90-Day Rewrite.
