Whenever an ***?piring writer speaks to me about fiction writing ***?ps, one of the most frequently ***?ked questions is: how do you find the ***?me to write?

The answer I ****?t to give, “just do it,” doesn’t quite suffice. So in this article, we’ll examine the matter in a little more detail.

We live in a busy world, with numerous demands on our ***?me: jobs, spouses, children, draining work commutes, TV shows we ****?t to watch, emails to read and respond to, phone calls to ***?mily and friends. When you look at your daily schedule, it may appear that you simply don’t have ***?me to write.

Well, I’ve got both ****?d and bad news for you.

The ****?d news: even with a ***?ght schedule, you can still get work done. The bad news? Something in your lifestyle will have to suffer, or change, to accommodate your fiction writing.

There are no short ***?ts, no easy answers. You’ve got to get creative–and motivated.

For example, do you get a lunch break at your job? Start taking a notepad with you and using that ***?me–even if it’s only thirty minutes–to work on your stories. Do you commute to work via carpool, bus, or subway? Instead of reading the newspaper or listening to music on your iPod, plug away on your novel.

One of the keys to productivity is learning how to identify those pockets of free ***?me during the day, and then using them to your benefit. It’s not ***? hard ***? you may think. In ***?ct, when you really examine your daily schedule, you might be ***?tounded at how much you could accomplish.

Can you do some fiction writing while your children are playing, eating, or napping? Could you scribble or ****?tate a few paragraphs while waiting in line somewhere? Zip out some prose ***? you wait for dinner to cook?

And yes, you might even have to give up some things. Do you really have to watch all of those TV shows every week? Do you have to spend hours on social networking web sites, accomplishing nothing in particular?

Locate the “fat” in your life, trim it out, and replace it with some fiction writing! Even if all you can manage is just one hour a day, that is something. Do a page an hour and you’ll have a solid draft in 9 – 10 months, which isn’t so bad at all.

You can do it. Really. Starting today.


- Brandon R. Massey

I began my writing career as a poet, and I’m still a poet. So my journey into fiction was never a planned career move. In fact, my first short story arrived as a complete shock. No kidding.

Because I have written and published poetry in books and magazines for years, I’ve developed a writing schedule that provides time to write every day, always a half hour after breakfast each morning and again after dinner every evening. I also keep a notepad and pen next to the bed to capture any lines of poetry if they float through my mind while I drift off to sleep. This means I’ve not only learned how to write pages of notes in the dark but also how to decipher those scribbles in the morning.

About eleven years ago, as I fell asleep one night, several lines suddenly appeared. Before I could decide to wake up and write them down, a startling thought flared in my mind like a wild firecracker: “This isn’t a poem…it’s the first paragraph of a short story, and I’ve never written fiction before!”

My eyes popped open, I grabbed the notepad, and followed the thread of those lines until I’d written three paragraphs of a short story in the dark. That was my first experience seeing an imaginary character in my mind and following her around, writing down her words and actions.

Throughout the next year different characters and their stories peopled my mind, and I began writing and publishing short fiction in magazines. I had never taken a writing class, so when I began writing poetry in my early thirties, I studied the books of contemporary poets, and eventually developed my own form of free verse poetry. I approached fiction in the same manner. I read and studied all the short story collections I could find, and ultimately created an experimental format for my short fiction, which resembled a prose poem composed of segments, each signaling a scene change or a change in a character’s thought process. Editors loved it, and almost all of my short stories appeared in magazines and literary journals. Those stories were eventually collected in a book that sold well for many years.

But two years later, short fiction no longer satisfied me, and I began to crave a longer form of creative expression, like a novel or novella. I could feel a novel percolating within me, but I knew nothing about the characters or plot. With no revelations emerging from my subconscious, I sensed this novel needed time to develop, so I began writing poetry again and published several poetry books.

Five years passed, and then one afternoon the title of the novel suddenly sizzled through my mind. The next day the main character appeared and announced her name. And on the third day she began telling her story, and a plot emerged. At the time, I had just started a new collection of poetry, but that hardly mattered. I’d been waiting for this novel for years, and once it arrived I dropped everything, grabbed my notebook (all my first drafts are handwritten), and four months later I had completed a short novel. Years later, I would add more material to this novel and republish it as the first in my series of Occult novels for women.

After the main character in that first novel began speaking, the entire writing experience flowed quickly in the white heat of a creative blaze. I always say I’m lucky I remembered to breathe during those amazing months! But don’t let this throw you. That was the first and last time I had to wait for a novel idea. Now new characters and plot ideas arrive frequently, and the day after I finish one novel I usually begin the next.

So, how did I write my first novel? First, I let the main character tell me who she was and what the primary plot of the novel would be. Next, several subplots emerged. And that was all I needed to start writing. For short stories I never used a structured outline. Instead, I patched those stories together organically, as if they were fabric swatches in a quilt, jumping back and forth between the past and present, allowing the characters to tell me what comes next. If you work this way too, you’ll feel comfortable arranging the scene and the characters in your mind, grabbing your notebook, and then following the characters around, writing down their words, thoughts, and actions. However, I found the prose poetry format I created for my short stories wouldn’t work for a novel. It just didn’t feel right. So I tweaked and tweaked and developed another experimental format that I still use today.

As I mentioned before, I do not use an outline for my novels, but I do edit each chapter completely before I continue. I work like this for two reasons. First, I submit each chapter as a short story to magazines and literary journals when I finish it, so the novel will gain publication credits, the kind of acknowledgements publishers and agents love to see. Second, polishing each chapter gives me the time to submerge myself in the characters and to intuit how the story should progress into the next chapter. Best of all, when I finish the last chapter I have a polished novel manuscript. Then it’s just a matter of going back and adding details to earlier chapters, important data that emerged during the process of writing the novel. Finally, I conduct one last punctuation and grammar check, and that’s it. I’ve written another novel ready to be published by one of my publishers.

If you follow this formula, relax, and allow the story to develop organically, you’ll end up with a polished first novel manuscript sitting on your computer desk before you know it. And you’ll enjoy every step of the process!


- Laura Stamps

I am trying to write a book, a paperback novel average length maybe 250-300 pages. I’m guessing it would be around 10-12 words per line.
I really have no idea on how to set it up, I just have the story and thats it. What is the best way to do this, The problem I’m having is knowing where to end and begin chapters. I dont have MSWord, I only have notepad, is there a small program you could recommend?
thanks electric blue
- standrkm

When you hear the word ‘creativity’ what comes to mind? How about words like spontaneity, impulsive, hasty, on the spot ideas?

Some reason we associate creativity and not just in writing with the ability to quickly think on the spot. How we often perceive what creativity is limits whether we actually do become creative in our writing. If you want to become a great writer and you think a great writer as someone who can write a lot of articles, then you’ll work towards writing a lot of articles. If a basketball player wants to be great at this chosen sport and he thinks a great basketball player is someone who scores thirty plus points a game, then he’ll try to score thirty plus points a game.

Your limiting views affect how you act. These mental road blockages you erect can often constrain not only your creativity, but how you see creativity.

Hopefully I’ve expanded your views as to what creativity skills actually are. Now I’m going to give you some ideas for capturing this “impulsiveness” I explained about at the start. This advice I give you will be no surprise to you but hopefully my perspective and experience will change your mind about the technique and encourage you to begin using it for improving your creative writing skills.

All this technique is about is writing down your ideas.

From my experiences, I hear people going on about writing thoughts down on a notepad and I think to myself, “I’m not carry around a notepad, how damn geeky” or “it’s just another thing to lug around”. I see it as more of a liability then an asset. Rather, I should say “I use to see it as more of a liability then an asset.

Now, I have ideas for writing that pop into my head and I then quickly whack it down on paper.

When writing I do not come up with the ideas in a single session. I don’t sit down and say that “right now, I’m going to come up with an idea about helping people with depression”.

Carrying a notepad works whether you like it or not, but I like to write on scrap paper with a nearby pen. I do however risk not having the resources available but they have always been available.

My ideas come to me when I’m washing my hands, or when I’m at work. This is because I have a passion, and the thoughts about the subjects I love, I always think about. It is when I am daydreaming about my passion that creativity about possibilities hit me.

Events may spark ideas into you. For example, on a television show I see people arguing. I begin to wander off in my mind and ask myself “why are they arguing? What could be done to stop this?” Then wham. A solution I have never thought of hits me.

You need to capture the impulsiveness we see in creativity and begin write it down on paper. Have a passion and let this explode your ideas. Don’t let your creativity go to waste and start capturing them on paper. Use this simple and definitely overlooked to be able to improve your creative writing skills.


- Joshua Uebergang

Writing an article doesn’t just mean putting down thoughts into words then typing and writing it. You have to capture the awareness of your readers, teach them valuable know-how and get them to keep on reading. To send your message across you have to get the attention of the reader and have a firm grasp of their interest and pique their curiosity.

The main ingredient in baking up an article is a large dose of creativity. While creativity may come natural to many people, some just gets into a block or something to that effect that can drive someone to feel slight at uneasy. Many writers have literally torn their hair out when they get writers block and just can’t seem to get their creative juices flowing.

Putting words into images in the readers mind is an art. A clear and crisp depiction requires a certain flair that only creativity can provide. Similes and metaphors help a lot, but the way an article gets entwined word for word, sentence by sentence then paragraph by paragraph into a whole article develops the essence of the article.

So just what do you have to do when nothing comes to mind? There is no surefire ways to get the perfect ideas but there are easy ways to get your creative juices flowing. No one can guarantee you of having the perfect mindset but many methods may aid you in achieving that state of mind. Here are five battle tested easy ways to overcome such issues.

1) Keep a diary or a journal with you always. Ideas can be triggered by anything you may hear, see, or smell. Your senses are your radar in finding great ideas. Write all of them into a journal and keep it with you for future reference. You may also write down anything that you have read or heard, someone’s ideas could be used to develop your own ideas and this is not stealing. Remember that ideas and creativity can come from anywhere; it’s the development of the idea that makes it unique.

Not everyone are going to be able to remember to bring their journal or notepad along with them. However, it is highly likely that they would have their mobile on them. Today, mobiles has the capability to record instant audio and you can certainly take good advantage of your telephonic devices whenever that golden ideas start to kick in your head.

2) Relax and take time to sort things out. A jumbled mind cannot create any space for new ideas. Everyone must have a clear mind if one wishes to have their creativity in full speed. Get rid of all obstacles that can be a hindrance to your creativity. If you are bothered by something, you cannot force your mind to stay focused.

Try to relax every time that you can and think about your experiences and interactions with others. Your experiences are what shape your mindset and your opinions which could be reflected on your writings. Try to discover yourself, find out what triggers your emotions. Go back to the past. Discover what inspires you and what ticks you off. You can use these emotions to help you in expressing yourself and your ideas, with this you can grow creatively.

If it still fails, try to listen to calming music like the one you normally hear in the spa. You can easily buy these relaxing tunes from the music stores or download it off Itunes. You’re bound to feel better in the end.

3) Create a working place that can inspire your creativeness. Your working place can be quite a hindrance if it doesn’t make you feel happy or relaxed. Creativity comes from being in a good state of mind and a messed up workplace that causes distraction won’t be conducive in firing up your creative flow.

Surround your working place with objects that makes you happy and relaxed. You may put up pictures, or scents, objects that inspire, or anything that can get your creativeness cranking. A clean and well organized workplace also rids of distractions and unwanted hindrances. With a good working place, you can work in peace and never notice the time pass by.

4) Set the mood. Setting the mood requires you to just go with the moment or to induce yourself to feeling what makes your mind works best. Finding out what makes you tick could help you find ways to get your creative juices flowing. Set the pace and tempo for your mood and everything else will follow.

There are many ways to set the mood. Some writers have been known to use alcohol, a little sip of wine to stir up the imagination. Some would like some mood music while others let the lighting of the environment create the mood.

5) Go on a getaway and just do something different. Letting yourself go and have fun produces adrenaline that can make your imagination go wild. Take an adventure or a solemn hike. Whatever it is that is unusual from your daily routine can take the rut out of your schedule. In no time at all, your creativeness will make use of that experience and get your imagination to go on overdrive.


- Ambar Hamid