Creative Writing 101: Everything You Need To Get Started

7 min readMay 9, 2022

You can attend lessons in creative writing and receive a degree in it, but all you truly need are your creative thinking and writing capabilities to execute it. The process of putting your imagination on paper is known as creative writing. It’s verbal art; it’s writing free of the limits that come with other types of writing, such as persuasive or informative.

What is creative writing?

The purpose of creative writing is to elicit emotion in the reader by expressing a topic. The topic is the fundamental meaning that the work expresses in narrative (which includes literature, film, graphic novels, creative nonfiction, and many video games).

Take, for example, the film Jaws (and the book that inspired it). A shark terrorizes a seaside hamlet, and the men entrusted with killing the shark are the focus of the narrative. The film’s themes, however, include humanity’s ambition to control nature, tradition vs. innovation, and how potential wealth may motivate powerful individuals to make risky, even catastrophic choices.

Creative writing is defined by more than just a topic. Other elements often encountered in creative writing include:

Connecting, or at least attempting to connect, with the reader’s emotions
Writing from a specific point of view
Organizing the text around a narrative structure
A narrative structure can be complex or simple and serves to shape how the reader interacts with the content.
Using imaginative and/or descriptive language

Although literary techniques such as metaphors and foreshadowing are sometimes used in creative writing to develop a story and portray a topic, they are not required. Neither is dialogue, despite the fact that it appears in almost all works of fiction. It’s also not necessary for creative writing to be fictitious. Creative writing includes dramatic presentations of genuine tales, memoirs, and observational comedy pieces.

What isn’t creative writing?

Research papers, on the other hand, are not creative writing. Analytical essays, argumentative essays, and other forms of academic writing are not. Personal and professional communications are also not considered creative writing, so your emails, social media postings, and formal corporate announcements all fall within this category. These types of writing offer information but do not articulate themes. Their aims are to enlighten and educate readers, as well as gather information from them in certain situations. However, although they are capable of evoking emotions in readers, this is not their main objective.

But what about blog postings, for example? Personal writings, perhaps? These are broad categories, and individual works within them may be deemed creative writing if they fit the aforementioned requirements. This blog post, for example, is not creative writing since it tries to educate, but a blog post that takes the reader through a first-person narrative of an event would be.

Types of creative writing

Creative writing comes in many forms. These are the most common:

Novels

Novels have been around since the seventeenth century. The majority of people nowadays associate books with novels.

A book is a fictitious narrative of 60,000 to 100,000 words, however they may be as little as 40,000 words or as long as 100,000.

Novellas are short tales that are too short to be considered novels but too long to be considered short stories. A novella is a short tale that is between 10,000 and 40,000 words long. You may also come across the term “novelette,” which refers to works that are between 7,500 and 19,000 words long.

Short stories

Short tales are fictional works of between 5,000 and 10,000 words in length. They convey whole storylines with at least one character, some type of conflict, and at least one topic, much like books.

Flash fiction is defined as a tale that is fewer than 1,000 words long.

Poetry

Because poetry is such an open-ended form, it may be difficult to describe. A poem does not need to have a certain length. It is not required to rhyme. Sonnets, haikus, sestinas, blank verse, limericks, and free verse are among the various types of poetry found in civilizations across the globe.

Unless you’re producing a particular style of poem, like a haiku, which has strict guidelines about the amount of lines or structure, the laws of poetry are typically flexible. While a poem isn’t necessary to have a certain length or structure, or to have flawless language, it must stir emotions in the reader, be written from a certain point of view, and reflect a topic.

You have a song when you put a poetry to music.

Plays, TV scripts, and screenplays

Plays are meant to be performed on stage. Screenplays are meant to be made into films, and TV scripts are meant to be made into television programs. Scripts for videos produced for other platforms fit into this category as well.

Plays, TV scripts, and screenplays have a lot in common with novels and short stories. They tell stories that evoke emotions and express themes. The difference is that they’re meant to be performed rather than read, and as such, they tend to rely much more on dialogue because they don’t have the luxury of lengthy descriptive passages. But scriptwriters have more than just dialogue to work with; writing a play or script also involves writing stage or scene directions.

Each type of script has its own specific formatting requirements.

Creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction covers all the kinds of creative writing that aren’t fiction. Here are some examples:

Personal essays: A personal essay is a true story told through a narrative framework. Often, recollections of events are interspersed with insights about those events and your personal interpretations and feelings about them in this kind of essay.
Literary journalism: Think of literary journalism as journalism enhanced by creative writing techniques. These are the kinds of stories often published in outlets like The New Yorker and Salon. Literary journalism pieces report on factual events but do so in a way that makes them feel like personal essays and short stories.
Memoirs: Memoirs are to personal essays what novels are to short stories. In other words, a memoir is a book-length collection of personal memories, often centering around a specific story, that often works opinions, epiphanies, and emotional insights into the narrative.
Autobiographies: An autobiography is a book you write about yourself and your life. Often, autobiographies highlight key events and may focus on one particular aspect of the author’s life, like her role as a tech innovator or his career as a professional athlete. Autobiographies are often similar in style to memoirs, but instead of being a collection of memories anchored to specific events, they tend to tell the author’s entire life story in a linear narrative.
Humor writing: Humor writing comes in many forms, like standup comedy routines, political cartoons, and humorous essays.
Lyric essays: In a lyric essay, the writer breaks conventional grammar and stylistic rules when writing about a concept, event, place, or feeling. In this way, lyric essays are like essay-length poems. The reason they’re considered essays, and not long poems, is that they generally provide more direct analysis of the subject matter than a poem would.

Tips for writing creatively

Give yourself time and space for creative writing

It’s hard to write a poem during your lunch break or work on your memoir between calls. Don’t make writing more difficult for yourself by trying to squeeze it into your day. Instead, block off time to focus solely on creative writing, ideally in a distraction-free environment like your bedroom or a coffee shop.

Get to know yourself as a writer

The more you write, the more in tune you’ll become with your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. You’ll identify the kinds of characters, scenes, language, and pieces you like writing best and determine where you struggle the most. Understanding what kind of writer you are can help you decide which kinds of projects to pursue.

Try something new.
Do the kind of writing that you struggle with after you’ve identified them. You’ll never improve as a writer if you simply concentrate on your strengths. Challenge yourself to write in a different genre or experiment with an entirely new writing style. If you’re a short story writer, for example, try poetry or personal essays.

Need some assistance getting started? Try one (or all!) of these 20 creative writing prompts.

Learn from other writers

There are lots of resources out there about creative writing. Read and watch them. If there’s a particular writer whose work you enjoy, seek out interviews with them and personal essays they’ve written about their creative processes.

Don’t limit yourself to big-name writers, either. Get involved in online forums, social media groups, and if possible, in-person groups for creative writers. By doing this, you’re positioning yourself to learn from writers from all different walks of life . . . and help other writers, too.

I wrote something. Where do I go from here?

Give yourself a pat on the back: You did it! You finished a piece of creative writing — something many attempt, but not quite as many achieve.

What comes next is up to you. You can share it with your friends and family, but you don’t have to. You can post it online or bring it to an in-person writing group for constructive critique. You can even submit it to a literary journal or an agent to potentially have it published, but if you decide to take this route, we recommend working with an editor first to make it as polished as possible.

Some writers are initially hesitant to share their work with others because they’re afraid their work will be stolen. Although this is a possibility, keep in mind that you automatically hold the copyright for any piece you write. If you’d like, you can apply for copyright protection to give yourself additional legal protection against plagiarizers, but this is by no means a requirement.

Create something unique.

We can’t make you more creative, but we can help you polish your writing so that your creativity shows through. After you’ve finished writing, Grammarly will notice any errors and offer powerful word choices that correctly communicate your point.