Part II

Other writing exercises you can try to help you transfer your creative thinking into creative writing include brainstorming (listing sub-topics and smaller ideas under your main topic or idea freely), and mapping.

Once you’ve settled on a main idea, and completed a writing exercise to help get you warmed up for some serious creative writing, it’s time to start organizing your ideas. This doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. Create a detailed outline, broad outline, organized list, or summary; or find another way to organize and structure your writing. Once your ideas are organized, it’s time to start the real writing.

But how is this accomplished? In all honesty, the best way to start writing is to just start writing. The sooner you start writing, the better. Most writers will admit that they usually don’t know what they’re going to write until they write it. When writing your first draft, don’t focus on perfection. Just write, using your ideas and creative thinking. You may find that after putting your ideas to paper with your first draft, your focus or position came out differently than you planned, which is completely normal. That’s what creative writing is—creative!

Many writers revise their work as they write. Revising is an important part of the creative writing process, but make sure that while writing your first draft that you focus on writing and on initially getting your ideas to paper—turning ideas into words.

After you’ve completed your first draft, it’s time to focus on revising (or writing second and third drafts). Good creative writing always includes revisions, which involves reading, rereading, rethinking, and reworking your piece until you feel satisfied that your meaning is clear and complete, and that the content is interesting, informative, and accurate. Check both the content and the structure of your work while revising.
 
Finally, turning creative thinking into creative writing isn’t complete until you’ve edited and proofread your work.  While editing and proofreading may not be the most glamorous components of writing—particularly creative writing—they are nonetheless essential to any creative writing endeavor. In this stage, you must check for sentence structure, punctuation problems, spelling errors, grammatical mistakes, typos, and style inconsistencies.

You may want to have someone else who is qualified to edit and proofread your document for you—particularly if this task is not your forté, and if you just need a fresh pair of eyes. Many creative writers are notorious for making the same errors and becoming immune to them.

Turning ideas into words isn’t always easy, but with a little organization and a little effort, you’ll soon be on your way from creative thinking to creative writing.

Dal Hayer writes featured articles for Article Blogs

Article Source: http://www.thearticleblogs.com

You may reprint this article in its entirety so long as you do not modify the content or resource box.