Writing Tips for Budding Writers – Ideas
Please keep in mind, while this writing advice for budding writers has been successful for the people I have coached, I do not offer any guarantees. I merely hope it might help stoke the fire burning within and get you started on a writing journey.
It is now time to think about writing. I hope you haven’t taken a deep breath and switched off the computer in fright? There’s no reason to take flight, this will be easy, a piece of cake.
What do you imagine is the most often asked question of writers? At least its the one I field most. Where do you get your ideas? Because I write contemporary (in today’s world) I get ideas from all around me. Newspapers, magazines, TV, movies, songs, people I know, people I see, incidents I hear about. I guess getting ideas when writing anything but contemporary must be a lot more difficult.
Hey, I have a great idea for a story!
Everyone is different but I know you have ideas floating around inside your head, otherwise you wouldn’t be thinking about wanting to write. My writing tip for this week is to begin harvesting all those ideas.
Whether you use a file on your computer or a shoe box or similar, it doesn’t really matter. What you’re wanting to achieve with this is a pool of ideas written down somewhere together. Over the next week jot down whatever ideas you have for a story, or many stories. Don’t worry about how you express these ideas, this file is for your eyes only. You needn’t worry about grammar or spelling or anything like that. What you want is to have your ideas transferred from inside your head to somewhere visual. There need be no order to what you write, just let it flow out. If you’re using the computer, its so easy to cut and paste later if you wish. If you prefer longhand, just scribble each thought or idea onto a separate piece of paper and put it into the box. Worrying about making some order of these thoughts happens later. For now you just want to let words flow.
I have a shoe box on a shelf in my office. It’s not exactly full but there are many slips of paper, newspaper/magazine articles, pictures and photographs along with hand written notes of things I might one day use thrown in there. They’ve been accumulating for years. I use this for ideas rather than my computer as I can put anything in there. A file of ideas on computer wouldn’t work half as well for me. I want to have all these type of things together.
After this little exercise, you should have at least a few pages with your scribbled thoughts taking rough shape. You’ve started writing.