Creative Writing - 5 Reasons Why You're Not Reaching Your Full Creative Writing Potential

How happy are you with your creative writing? Do you feel you’re reaching close to your potential? Do you enjoy writing or has it become a painful struggle to even put together a handful of sentences you’re proud of having written?

There are many reasons why you might not be reaching your creative writing potential.

There’s plenty you can do to overcome each of them and write more freely, more deeply and with more reward and enjoyment.

The first step is to identify what’s holding you back, what’s limiting you.

Here are 5 of the most common reasons why we don’t write near our potential, and some tips on how to move on from them:

1. You don’t write regularly. This is one of the big secrets of writing consistently and feeling you’re progressing your writing. The big mistake we often make is to only write when we’re “in the mood”, or when the circumstances are right. Which becomes less and less often.

Solution: Write at the same time every day for a minimum period of time. Chose a time of day that works best for you, when you find it easier and more natural to write. Then write for 15 minutes at this time each day for 14 days. What you write is not too important. What is important is that you show up and write.

2. You’re not giving yourself permission. Although on the surface you seem to be freely going to write, you’re aware that somehow you hold yourself back. On a deeper level, why might you be doing this?

We don’t give ourselves permission to be creative for a number of possible reasons. Maybe you don’t think you’re really very talented, or you don’t deserve to be successful in writing, or that spending time writing is selfish. Ask yourself some honest questions, and give some honest answers. Once you see why you’re holding yourself back, you can start to take action to move on.

3. You don’t capture your ideas. A lack of ideas is a common complaint amongst creative artists of all kinds. The real issue though is not about not having enough ideas, it’s about not CAPTURING enough ideas.

Get yourself an ideas journal and begin jotting down ideas as soon as they come to you. Keep it with you at all times and get into the habit of using it. The more ideas you note down, the more freely you’ll find more new ideas come to you. Soon ideas will appear everywhere you look.

4. You’re afraid to experiment. If you feel you’ve been writing the same sentences about the same subjects, in that same style for longer than you can remember, you probably would benefit from experimenting a little, giving yourself some fresh motivation and challenge.

Pick a few small but very different writing projects. Choose styles or forms of writing that you’ve always wanted to try but haven’t. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, you’re writing just to experiment and get some new perspectives. When you go back to more familiar styles, your writing will be enriched and more stimulating.

5. You’re writing for product not process. It’s easy to get caught in writing just to create an end product and be so focused on getting it finished that you forget to actually enjoy your writing along the way.

A great way of combating this is to regularly embark on writing projects just to enjoy the process. Detach completely from the outcome, it doesn’t matter that you don’t have a beautifully packaged end product every time. Get back in touch with your love of writing, and remember why it is you enjoy writing.

Pick just one of these tips and start using it today to help get closer to your true creative writing potential.

Which one are you going to choose?

And if you’d like to get your creative writing kick started again right away, I invite you to get your FREE 5 part creative writing ecourse at http://www.YouAreACreativeWriter.Com