How creative writing can help improve your writing business

If you think creative writing is a waste of time, think again.

Whether it’s fiction, scriptwriting, or poetry, creative writing can help improve the same writing skills you use to write blog posts, white papers, articles, speeches, or marketing materials.

How?[ctt template=”1″ link=”X90Fa” via=”no” ]Whether it’s fiction, scriptwriting, or poetry, creative writing can help improve the same writing skills you use to write blog posts, white papers, articles, speeches, or marketing materials. [/ctt]

Creative writing forces you to really think about the subtle ways words can be used to convey subtext and meaning. Word choices. Sentence structure. Giving characters voices. Creating a logical flow. All of these things, and more, apply to creative writing as well as persuasive writing, business writing, copywriting—all types of writing.

Every so often I enter writing competitions just to challenge myself. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable writing short stories, so about once a year I like to enter a short story contest. I particularly enjoy flash-fiction competitions where your story has to include something specific (mostly so writers don’t cheat by submitting something they’ve been working on for months). Having a tight deadline forces you to buckle down and write. There’s no time to overthink your work. The first time I entered the Writers Weekly 24-Hour Short Story Contest I wound up getting a prize. Not a top prize by any stretch of the imagination, but my name was listed among the honorees and I won a couple of e-books. That was enough to encourage me to try again.

A few years ago a good friend entered a brand new locally-run national playwriting competition, Rockford New Play Festival. She was one of the six winners. The combined creativity of all six 10-minute plays that were read at the festival inspired me, and I decided to enter the following year. My play, The Grove, was one of that year’s six featured plays. I’m still kicking myself for not entering the competition last year, but a month or two ago when I heard the competition was seeking entries I knew I wanted to enter it again.

Yesterday I submitted my play.

I’m not sharing the title with you, because I understand playwrights’ names are redacted before the scripts are read. But I will offer this much: I like this play a lot better than the first one I entered. I have no idea if it will make the final cut—or even the first cut—but that’s not the point of entering. Challenging myself to create characters, a setting, and give them a message that can be conveyed in 10 minutes or less is what matters.

I think I accomplished that. Sure, I threw out three ideas before coming up with one that clicked, but late Saturday afternoon I sat down and wrote three pages. When I still liked those three pages on Sunday, I expanded them to seven. I asked a couple of trusted writer friends—Mika and Keith—to read the rough draft. They gave me enough feedback to tweak a few things that made the overall play stronger. (See what I meant about being part of a wonderful community of writers?)

It was exciting to see “Thank you for submitting your play to the 2018 Rockford New Play Festival!” arrive in my email box seconds after I submitted my entry. Winners won’t be announced until the end of May, and I’m pretty sure my odds of winning dropped because I encouraged Keith to enter too (and as usual his play is brilliant), but it will still be exciting to see what six plays win.

The fact that I wrote a play I actually like while knee-deep in writing projects for my clients is a good feeling, too.

What types of creative writing do you enjoy? Have you entered any contests or submitted your creative work to publishers, producers, or other markets? How does creative writing benefit your writing business?