Source: How to be a Writer by Barbara Baig

Creativity

Many people seem to believe that a piece of creative writing comes into being fully formed in a writer’s mind, and then all he has to do is to write it down. While this may happen occasionally, it is not typical. Creativity in writing is much more a process of collecting material then selecting “bits” from that material and connecting those bits together. We can’t be creative unless we have filled our content-minds with lots of material. So we need to spend a lot of time practicing the activity of collecting.

Memory and Expertise

Memory is a great source of material for writing: for poems or memoirs or essays or family histories or letters to an old friend. You can also, if you are writing fiction, donate bits and pieces from your memories to your characters and your stories; you can use your creative faculty to extract details and events from memory and then recombine them to invent people who are realistic but who never actually lived, stories that never really happened.

Any subject that you know something about can provide you with material for a piece of writing. Many writers are people who take what they know seriously enough to write about it; we call them experts in their respective fields. Expertise can inform a piece of writing in any genre, not just nonfiction.

Observation

The power of observation – of being aware of and noticing what is around us – is a natural human faculty that we are all +born with.

How to develop your observational powers:

• Turn outwards
• Do external collecting
• Collect sensory details
• Collect sensory details from memory
• Use sensory details
• Use focused freewriting
• Use observation as a springboard

Imagination

well-trained imagination is essential for any kind of writing that we call “creative,” writing that speaks to the imaginations or readers and feels “real” to them.

The Subconscious

When you do freewriting and things come to you – ideas or insights, images or information – that you did not know you knew, that’s your subconscious mind at work. Just as important is that your subconscious will often continue to give you more “stuff” eve after you have stopped your writing practice session.

Curiosity

Curiosity – the desire to know – is the essential foundation of any real learning. It is also one of the best ways to build our content-minds to discover subjects we might want to write about and material we can use in writing