How to Take Your Writing to the Next Level
Writing is a journey to explore your own creativity. Here’s how to be more creative with it.
I’ve been writing for eight years now. I started writing seriously after attending an arts high school—a public free one, thankfully—where I majored in literary arts. For the longest time I was there, I was dead set on focusing screenwriting and being a fiction writer. For the longest time I refused to ever consider the realms of possibilities out there for me when it came to creativity, and, in part, that was denied due to the lack of access to other classes in the arts. When I finally made it into college, that’s when my writing and creativity really began to blossom.
After eight years, I’ve published a lot of writing online, so I’ve gotten a feel for the writer and editorial side of things. But, best of all, I tracked and measured how my writing grew and what practices truly helped me expand my skillset. Writing isn’t something you can’t just wait for inspiration in order to do. You need to be able to sit down and actually crank out content when needed. Some of my best works were when I sat down with my computer on airplane mode and forced myself to write about anything under the sun.
That being said, I wanted to share some of the tips that I’ve found helped me throughout the years. Hope you enjoy and use them well!
Don’t stick to one genre.
I think one of the greatest failures of writing institutions nowadays is having people get an MFA or something specifically in just poetry. If you look at the past, a lot of the greatest writers never just limited themselves to a single genre. They may have been famous as being a poet, but rarely did someone actually be only a poet.
One of my favorite writers and icons of all time is the lovely Edna St. Vincent Millay, and as I read the Nancy Milford biography on her, I was captivated with how she branched out into experimental theatre during her time with the Provincetown Players. Now her play Aria de Capo is one of the best-known plays by a female writer.
Some people also hole themselves by saying, “Oh, I’m a poet.” Names and labels have a lot of power in life, and so do self-fulfilling prophecies. If you say you don’t do fiction, then you’re never going to be able to do fiction. It’s as easy as that. I like to label myself as a creative purely because I don’t want to subconsciously limit myself in regards to what I may do in the future. I want to try playwriting. I want to write a novel. There are so many things I want to do with my life.
Anyways, experiment. Trying writing a theatrical piece that can be performed completely through poetry (think of the piece For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf—that was a series of poems that became the second play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. The first play was Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun a decade earlier). Write lyric essays. Make a multimedia art and poetry piece. The world is your oyster.
Make a routine that is specific to you.
I’ve mentioned the significance of routines before in my blog posts. I’m a very big believer in habits and routines, probably become my personality is Type 8 and I’m an INTJ. But I cannot stress this enough: you need to be able to find time to sit down. I think a lot of us put pressure on ourselves to make money, publish a lot of work to become famous, and check off some imaginary checklist that was made by someone else. If that’s what you genuinely want, sure go ahead and do that. But when you put yourself into a schedule, you start to accomplish the things you want to do.
If you don’t have the time to write, I recommend doing what I do: picking words out of lectures and everyday conversations and turning them into something. When I was a business major taking boring classes like International Finance or Team Development Workshop, when there were lulls in the class I just wrote down random words the professor was saying. I’d then turn them into poems, which not only helped me study and remember the content through association, but I also had some strange but neat poems in my arsenal.
Don’t submit your work for five months.
In 2021, I stopped submitting to literary magazines for about four to five months. I stopped submitting in July or August and used the first half of my gap year to just exist and create. That’s what really grounded me, despite the fact people on Twitter were posting their acceptances or rejections. I had time to exist, work on my graduate school apps, and write without the pressure of needing to be published. Most of these places won’t pay you enough to exist with their token payments anyways, so it made barely any differences. Then, when I submitted again at the end of the day, I got two paid acceptances almost immediately.
What I’m trying to get at, too, is the pressure of needing to feel like your work has to appeal to others. Once I stopped submitting, I genuinely stopped caring about appeasing others and did what I want. I got to write the dark pieces that have been creeping out of the corners of my mind, and they’re brilliant. Will they get published anywhere? Who knows.
Don’t read for pleasure. Use books as a tool to understand the market and style.
Pick up a book you’ve already read to test out this one. I often don’t read poetry or fiction for the sake of being entertained anymore, although I do know what my soft spots are and read books for fun in those areas. But again, pick up something you’ve already read before, preferably something you already own and not a library book, grab a highlighter, and start reading.
Highlight interesting sentences that you come across, or words that you find interesting. I tend to pick out really mundane words that I often forget about when I do this, and then when I want some inspiration, pick up an old copy of one of my books and flip it open, pick a word, then write a poem based on that word.
There’s a fine line though of plagiarism when you do this. I tend not to highlight entire phrases because of this, just individual words. I only highlight an entire sentence when I want to study the structure of it and see how it’s set up. This is how you learn distinctive styles and a writer’s techniques. You tend to write with what you’re inspired by, so be mindful of where inspiration ends and plagiarism begins.
Besides this, this method is also useful in identifying publishing trends. Certain writing styles and storylines tend to be popular in one year (like I say 2021 was the year where memoirs had a lot of food and dead mothers in the vein of Crying in H Mart and Tastes Like War). By keeping your finger on the trends, that will help you figure out how to send out your manuscripts and work later on. Publishing is a market and they want to sell at the end of the day rather than artistry.
