Are you actually a beginner?

We’d say you are not a beginner. You’re a practiced creative, because all human beings are creative by nature—you can’t help it! You have opinions and insights and perceptions and questions and a sense of humor. And you’ve been using language since you could talk.

But maybe you feel unsure about how to start writing in a way that gives you creative satisfaction. You might have had your faith your ability to express yourself damaged as a child, when essays came back marked roughly with red pen or adults were impatient and didn’t listen. If that’s true for you, know that it’s true for a lot of people—and a lot of writers. You can overcome those doubts just as they have.

Perhaps doubt isn’t an issue. You might be the kind of person who likes to do things well. Don’t we all? But not all of us mind doing things not so well to start with. And that can stand in your way of doing things you enjoy.

Zen practitioners work to unlearn what they think they know! It’s called beginner’s mind. So let’s say that even though you’re not actually a beginner, you’re starting with that very useful mindset, beginner’s mind. You’re willing to not know.

In fact, all writers are beginners when they start a new project. They don’t know how it’s going to turn out.

Write what you don’t know

Not so coincidentally, that’s the title of the 10-session book and self-paced online course that teaches you to write in the Imaginative Storm method and covers all aspects of writing: character, setting, narrative momentum. You’ll learn to tell your story with authenticity and emotional power, and if you don’t already have a story you want to tell, you’ll finish the course with some solid ideas. Along the way, you’ll transform your inner critic into your inner coach, find your writing voice, and learn to generate original, surprising images and ideas.

If you start writing with the Imaginative Storm method, you will save yourself a lot of angst and heartache, because you’ll learn that when you’re first putting words on the page, you don’t have to “get it right.”

Writing tips for beginners

Get a pen you like writing with and some paper to write on. Don’t start with a fancy blank notebook that makes you feel you ought to write well in it. Cheap spiral notebooks are great: wide-ruled is better because it’s less constraining than college-ruled. Or just use loose sheets of printer paper, and collect them in a folder. Honor what you’ve created by giving it a home!

We recommend writing by hand for a number of reasons. To understand why, watch our YouTube video in the series 11 Top Writing Tips: Tip #2, Why Writing By Hand is the Secret to Great Creative Writing.

Now, if you have something you’re burning to write, start it—but don’t start at the beginning. You may not really know where the beginning is, so if you try to start at the beginning, you can tie yourself in knots wondering if you’re starting in the right place. Start somewhere that’s absolutely not the beginning and ask yourself some questions about that incident: what don’t I remember? What didn’t I know? What wasn’t there? What didn’t happen?

Asking yourself questions like that gets you out of the neatly packaged version of your memory or idea that your rational mind has created. If you try to write that version, it will be flat and dull on the page. You might think that’s your fault, that you’re just not a good writer, but it isn’t your fault. It’s just a mistake in technique.

This is the value of prompts: they spark your imagination to look at your ideas, your perceptions, your memories, and your beliefs in surprising new ways. That’s what creative writing is.

It doesn’t have to be fancy or full of long words and complex grammar and weird imagery. If what you write surprises you, that’s creativity in action. And if you decide to share that writing with other people, they’ll connect with your words because they’ll have the true tang of authenticity.