Some years ago designer Bruce Mau created a Manifesto for how to make sure you keep growing. Below are three of my favorite ideas from that, and suggestions for how you can apply them to make sure your writing also keeps growing:
- Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
In your writing, experiment with starting the story at a different point than is your first instinct. For instance if you're writing a romance the logical first chapter might be when the potential lovers meet. What would the story be like if you started when they have their first argument? Or when they narrowly miss meeting each other and then another decade goes by? Or when they meet for the first time after they've broken up a year before? Have fun exploring the possiblities and don't pressure yourself to find "the right one." There may be lots of right ones. There will also be a lot that don't work, of course--so what? Stay playful and those just become part of the game.
- Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
Don't throw away ideas that don't work. Maybe you have a protagonist who is rich and you think about having a lottery win be the source of her money. Perhaps you decide it would make her a stronger character if she got the money through hard work. Might a lottery winner be an interesting person for her to meet? Or could the lottery winner fit into a totally different story? If something catches your interest make a record of it in a journal or a computer file and go back over those ideas from time to time.
- Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable.
Of course I'm not talking about plagiarism, but about identifying the essence of what makes the writing you most admire so appealing. For instance, I like the novels of Carl Hiaasen. His trademark is bizarre, larger than life characters (mostly criminals who come to a bad end due to their stupidity). In the kids' book I'm writing at the moment I am bringing a bit of that surreal take to my characters, especially to my protagonist's nemesis.
(For more ideas on how to write well, why not turn to the best writers of all time? I mean authors like Austen, Dickens, Hemingway, as well as modern masters of the craft. You'll find their writing advice in my newest book, Your Creative Writing Masterclass. It's published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon or your other favorite bookseller.)