3 Tips for New Writers

How to Nourish Your Joy for Writing

Congratulations on taking the first step toward your creative journey! This is an exciting time, but also scary. I started writing professionally five years ago and have had my fair share of moments when I felt like I didn’t know why I was writing. I loved storytelling, but I let negative thoughts into my head. So, these tips are to help you navigate this new time in life and nourish your joy for writing.

Have Fun

The first tip I give you as a new writer is to have fun. Write with abandon and always write for you. There will come a time in your writing journey where you will have readers and fans. You will want to please these people. This is natural. Making your readers happy is important or you won’t sell your works, right? There’s danger in writing for others, though. When you write for others, you lose track of your voice. You question your storytelling ability and the creative spark inside you doesn’t flicker like it once did. Always write for yourself first because authenticity matters. When you write freely and please yourself, everything else falls into place.

Find Your Circle

My next tip is to find a supportive circle. Not everyone will support your writing the way you want them to. Some people will think your writing is nothing more than a hobby. Others might be very critical and urge you to put away your thoughts and live a “normal” life. These are not the people you want in your circle. In my circle, I have a few creatives like myself, but I also have people who haven’t chosen the creative path. Although these people don’t think like I do or have the same aspirations as me, they raise me up and encourage my storytelling. Surround yourself with people who get you even if they’re not like you.

Know What Constructive Criticism Is

Know the difference between constructive criticism and trolls. If part of your writing journey includes publishing your works for an audience, learn to recognize the difference between helpful criticism and mean-spirited comments.

Constructive criticism improves your writing. It points out weak spots that sometimes we can’t see because we’re in the trenches with our story. A critical analysis of your work isn’t a personal attack. It’s feedback that gives you an extra boost for your story and helps your career to reach its fullest potential.

The motive behind mean-spirited comments is to tear you down. Most people, if they aren’t fond of a story, will not tell people to rip up the book. They won’t leave a 1-star review that says, “If this had been an actual book I would have tossed it in the garbage, but I didn’t want to lose my Kindle over a bad piece of writing.” Yes, that’s an actual comment I received five years ago for a book I wrote that, thankfully, many more people loved. In fact, it was an Amazon bestseller.

This leads me to my final point.

Don’t let others’ opinions of your writing stop you from doing what you love. I’ll be honest. The 1-star review I received hurt a lot. It dug deep and made me question whether writing was something I should be doing. But you know what? It made me better. It made me realize that if writing as a career was something I wanted to pursue; I would have to take the good with the bad. I would fail and have to rise again, bruised but with more knowledge and more resources to create amazing work.

Storytelling is an amazing gift and more stories need sharing in this crazy world we live in. Thank you for sharing your gift.

Piper Punches is an Amazon best-selling author of The Waiting Room, Missing Girl (a novella), and 60 Days. She is also the creator of The Murder Lawyer Series, a novelette series, about family and murder. Would you like to read the first story, When Luck Dies, for free? Get your free copy of this novelette here.

Originally published at www.quora.com.