Source: How to be a Writer by Barbara Baig

What Is Writing Practice?

Writing practice, like batting practice or practicing scales, is the repetition of an activity over and over to develop certain skills. It is not difficult; anyone, no matter his or her level of skill with writing, can do it. The most important thing to remember is that, in deciding to build your skills through practice, you are giving up having to be a performing writer. Instead you are letting yourself be a practicing writer.

Here are some ways to do that:

• Forget what you’ve learned
• Don’t treat practice like school
• Make a safe place for your practice
• Give yourself time for practice
• Engage in spiral learning
• Let go of expectations
• Let yourself play
• Give writing practice a try

Starting the Journey

As a practicing writer, you will be going on a wonderful, surprising, sometimes frustrating learning journey. This journey does not have to have a destination. Perhaps you do have some goals in mind (to write a novel or become a poet), perhaps you don’t. In either case, your journey will be most satisfying if you can take it one step at a time, as if you were walking.

Waking up the Content Mind: The Basic Practices

• Practice#1: Freewriting (Revisited)
  The purpose of this practice is two-fold. First, it will help you get familiar with your content-mind and how it works. Second, if you do the practice on a regular basis, it will also strengthen your content-mind.
• Practice#2: Collecting
  When you practice waking up your content-mind through free writing, you are also practicing another key writer’s skill: the ability to collect material.
• Practice#3: Reading as a Writer
  Every good writer is an educated writer – not educated in the traditional sense of having accumulated college degrees, but knowledgeable in his or her areas of interest. It takes time to educate yourself in this way, but you’ll be amply rewarded in the form of material and ideas for your writing.
• Practice#4: Reflecting on your Practice
  In becoming conscious of what we have learned, we discover, in a natural way, where we need to go next: what we need to learn, how we might learn it. Then, we can take another step on our writing journey. If we notice only what we haven’t done, then we never learn anything, and we stop ourselves from moving forward.