My First Writing Tip

Hello! Welcome to my first actual creative writing tips blog post.

The very first piece of advice they gave us at UEA was to keep an observation journal. Not a personal diary or a creative writing journal (although you should have one of those too) but a book of objective day to day observations.

It’s a great way to create really real characters. You can just jot down weird little quirks that you see in people on the street or odd fashion choices and even if you don’t find them inspiring in the slightest when you write them, they might one day turn into little character traits that make your piece of fiction more realistic.

Now, I know this is a hard – and pretty boring – thing to do every single day. My observation journal, which was compulsory homework, lasted from the 9^th October to the 24^th October and was of a total of 3 pages long. It consisted of things like…

12^th October – Motorbikes sound strangely like cows moo-ing from far away.

13^th October -“I see dead people. Said that to my optician once. What do you see? I see dead people”.

And, my personal favourite…

21^st October - “You named your cat after a disease?” “No, they named the disease after my cat.”

It’s been almost two years since I wrote these and I have absolutely no idea what disease was named after whose cat or what genius thought it was funny to quote Sixth Sense to his optician.

But, the point is, observation journals can and often do fail. So my piece of advice for this week is not ‘keep an observation journal’, but instead ‘don’t throw away anything that you’ve written. Ever’.

Because those things that you write and one day will have no memory of – like my diseased cat – might just turn into something great. (Maybe not like my diseased cat, then…).

In my observation journal I found some really sweet things like “a 7 year old’s plan to wrap up her pocket money in chewitt wrappers as a gift to her teacher” and “an almost entirely disintegrated sticker on a bench that looks like it was once a heart”.

There have been so many days when I have felt completely and utterly uninspired and have procrastinated by looking through old stories that I wrote on my laptop when I was 12 or flicking through notebooks I used to jot things down in when I was 13. And I have found something in there that might not have been written very well at the time but was actually quite a good story idea or could be used in a story I’m currently writing.

So there’s my advice for this week. Pretty simple. Keep an observation journal if you can. But if it fails, don’t throw it away or rip out the pages. Keep a shelf in your room of random notebooks containing crazy ramblings or fractions of short stories that were never finished because you never know what they might turn into.

I'll be back next week with another tip. Thanks for reading!