5 Daily Ways to Practice Writing
Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash
by Michelle
A singer practices their scales, from one octave to the next. A baseball batter practices their swing. Baby birds practice flying from high branches, and young whales need to be shown how to hunt by their pod.
Likewise, to get good at writing, Essay Narwhals should write.
Perhaps it isn’t time for you to draft your college application essays yet, so you don’t see the point in needing to practice writing. However, the more often you do something, it becomes easier to get better at doing that thing.
There’s no expectation for you to become the next big Nobel Prize winner in Literature; you can start small. How about starting with 5 daily ways to practice writing?
Though you may not be able to do all of these every single day, writing even 50 or 100 more words daily will help sharpen your ability to express yourself and reflect on your thoughts, emotions, and experiences.
1.Keep a journal.
The most obvious method for writing practice—whether it is a bullet journal with 5 kinds of washi tape and three sets of gel pens, or a simple notebook, journaling helps you pen down your thoughts and daily happenings in your life. If you prefer to go digital, keeping an online journal is an option too.
A journal can help you deal with stress and present an emotional outlet, and keeps a good record for yourself of how you live. What did you talk about with your friends? What problems were on your mind? What was a weird fact that you took time to google about that day? And when it comes time to write your college essay, you can also flip back to the beginning of your journal to see how you have changed and grown.
2. Engage in social media
Engaging in social media doesn’t have to mean hours of passively scrolling through content and pictures from news and your friends. Set a short amount of time—like 20 minutes at night for example—for actively responding and writing to others.
Your friend posted a picture of a painting they did? You can tell them what you liked about it. Have a multi-paragraph opinion about a recent episode of something you had watched? You can write a short essay on it. Thought of a long joke with a really bad pun at the end? Share it with your friends.
As long as it is used with some moderation around other important things on your schedule and is not being used to air inflammatory or bigoted thoughts, using social media can provide an easy, low-pressure way to benefit your writing skills.
3. Write poetry
There are hundreds and hundreds of forms and traditions for poems from the past few centuries. Some poems are long ballads or sonnets, and some are as short as a few lines.
There’s no need to share your poems with anyone as well—you can keep these poems personal and just for yourself. If you’re not sure where to start, blackout poetry is good way to wade in. If you’re feeling up for the challenge, there are many resources with prompts for writing a poem on your own.
4. Write microfiction
Microfiction has some wiggle room in its definition, though some standards count them as short stories with 100 words or fewer. You probably say even more than 100 words a day in your conversations, so microfiction can be one way for you to try writing something under creative constraints.
You can try your own hand at writing some microfiction with a prompt generator.
(You can also think about writing short miniplays or fanfiction if that’s more your thing, to practice how to use dialogue and character voices in your writing).
5. Make a zine
A zine can have any combination of short writings, poems, drawings, or quotations or anything else that you like. This article has a good example of how to make a zine for yourself. It’s a good way to use your own artistic and creative skills to fill up about 8 pages of paper. A page also has limited space depending on the paper that you use, which makes it great for figuring out how to organize your thoughts in a concise number of words.
As an Essay Narwhal, no matter if your song is short or long, rough or in a multi-harmony, it is worth expressing—use any of the ways above to practice writing, so you can share your songs with the ocean around you!
