Does your imagination often run wild with scenarios?
Do you enjoy writing those scenarios and turn them into stories?
Does your school offer any extra-curricular writing courses?
Did you join a literary club at school?
If this sound like you, you may very well enjoy creative writing. Many young students enjoy writing but they don’t understand what creative writing exactly is.
What is creative writing?
Creative writing consists of any type of writing that exists outside of professional, academic, journalistic or technical forms of writing. Important aspects of creative writing involve narration, development of characters or the use of literary tropes. Creative writing includes fictional literary creation and non-fictional literary creation, the former is mainly based on novels, the latter is based on prose, essays, memoirs, and biographical literature.
The core concept of creative writing shows that writing can be practiced, writers can be cultivated. Everyone can write, and anyone can become a writer. The uniqueness of writing is that your thoughts, experiences and opinions can be shared with others. Creative writing can easily be considered as just a hobby. But in the world as we know it today, writing skills are required for most occupations. Learning creative writing may not only makes one a writer, but one will also be able to gain a foothold in other fields.
What are some of the ways in which a student can seek creative writing opportunities?
Campus Creative Writing Club
In order to promote all-round development of students, schools offer wide range of extracurricular activities for students to explore their interests, and most schools have also established literary magazine clubs. Creative writing teachers are able to offer advice and improvements, and from time to time, some schools would also invite book or magazine authors to hold talks on creative writing.
Students who are interested to participate in their campus creative writing club should contact the school’s magazine editor or instructor at the beginning of the new school year.
Submit your works to local magazines
Students can also participate in literary magazines through regular submissions to their local magazine publishers. As most media are going online, students should search for such online platforms to seek more opportunities. Often, magazine columns will have a topic each week or month and writers will submit their writings based on the topic.
Magazine editors will choose and publish the ones they think stood out the most. To motivate writers to submit their work, authors whose works are selected to be published are usually awarded with prizes. For some highly competitive literary magazines, the probability of winning is not high, but don’t be discouraged. Submit your best work, learn from the feedback, and keep trying.
Create a fanfiction page
Some students may not like to participate in the above activities – they just like to write on their own, read the books they like, and write the stories they want to write. In this way, creating a blog or fanfiction may be another good idea for students to practice creative writing.
Fanfiction plays with the concept of using characters, settings and plot from existing publications. Fans (or students) would usually pick the movies or novels they love and write about anything they want to add on to or change the story plot. Writers would most certainly be able to write out their wildest imagination here.
The career ambitions of creative writers
Many careers require writing. The following fields involve writing: advertising, American literature, business, digital media, e-commerce, education and teaching technology, English, education, law, marketing, media research, public relations, radio and television, sports communication, technical and business writing, web and multimedia design, etc.
If you are interested in creative writing and want to make this a lifelong career, then take action, look for opportunities, arrange time effectively, and move towards your goals.
