DEVELOPING YOUR WRITING PRACTICE IN FOUR EASY STEPS If you’re coming (or thinking of coming) to UEA to study Creative Writing, one of the best things you can do to prepare is develop your own writing practice. Now, what does that mean? In the basic version it means developing a set of habits that start to make writing a part of your way of being in the world. Let’s divide those habits into four parts: reading, looking, writing and thinking.  1.    READING  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that all of us who write do so because others have written. The great writer and thinker, Susan Sontag, once wrote the following: ‘A writer is first of all a reader. It is from reading that I derive the standards by which I measure my own ... It is from reading, even before writing, that I became part of a community—the community of literature.’ Sounds pretty good, right? So, read. Seek out the writers that you love and read them. Then seek out the writers that they love and read them too. Browse bookshops, or online journals, for something new, that you’ve never read before. Or ask your friends, ‘what’s the best book you’ve ever read?’; you could even ask a teacher, or a parent, or some other adult. And don’t just limit your reading to the contemporary; seek out the classics and try to think why they might have achieved their status. In this way, we start to develop a sense of our own tastes, and a sense of our own taste gives us a sense of the kind of writer we might like to become. And reading, by the way, includes watching films or plays, even television. When you’re reading (or watching something), try and think about what it is you like and don’t like, what it is that’s keeping you reading or watching.  2.    LOOKING  Writers have to get their ideas from somewhere and in truth those ideas can only come from one place: the world. So, get in the habit of looking at the world. And when I say looking, I also mean hearing, tasting, touching and smelling. In other words, get in the habit of experiencing the world in all its sensory wonder. Among the things you might pay attention to are: your own behaviour and thoughts; the behaviour and actions of other people and animals; the weather and atmosphere; society and municipal behaviour as it changes from places to place; landscapes. And while you’re experiencing the world in this way, get in the habit of jotting your experiences down. Get a writer’s journal and take it with you wherever you go. A writer’s journal can be a physical notebook, in which you write down your experiences, but it can just as well be the notes app on your phone. As well as making notes of your observations, note down interesting facts, wherever you may find them, whether technical or historical; note down interesting sentences or images that you’ve encountered in your reading; note down those half-formed thoughts that tug at your mind in moments of idleness. In this way, not only will you develop the habit of looking, but you will also develop a repository of things – incidents, events, thoughts, ideas, descriptions – that might prove useful to your writing later on.  3.    WRITING Seems pretty obvious, no? Well, yes, but writing isn’t always easy. If you sit down and try and write a novel or a play from scratch it might not go brilliantly. So, I’d suggest starting small. Set yourself a challenge of writing for at least 10 minutes a day for five days out of seven. Some writers swear by the daily practice of ‘morning pages’. That’s writing for 10 minutes without thinking about it, or worrying if it’s good or bad, just allowing what’s in your head to come out on the page. A slightly more structured version of this is an exercise that I call ‘A-Z’. It’s pretty simple. Take the nearest book to hand and open it at random. Close your eyes and stick your finger on the page, then write the sentence you’re pointing to at the top of a piece of paper. Then open the book at another page and repeat the process. Write this line at the bottom of a piece of paper. Then write between those two lines, without thinking or worrying, for ten minutes. You’ll be surprised by how quickly your imagination starts to make connections between those two randomly selected lines. While much of what you write in this way will be a bit rubbish, every now and then you’ll come up with something worth developing and, when that happens take the time to develop it. And even if that doesn’t happen, all this writing will help you to develop a feel for language. 4.    THINKING  A lot of the most important work of writing takes place off the page, in our heads. And sometimes we need to remind ourselves that it is okay to take some time simply to think, to ponder, to dream. Allow yourself that time and legitimise the pleasure of being a thinking and dreaming person in the world.