How to Practice Creative Writing in a Way That Builds Your Skillset Quickly.
On Assignment for Pangolin Photo Safaris - Chobe River, Botswana (October, 2021)
When I was a little girl, I loved school. I loved learning, I loved having friends and I loved playing sport. However, owing to an unstable home environment, I moved schools often—13 times, to be exact. My shortest enrolment lasted three months; my longest, three years.
Many of these moves happened in the middle of a term or school year. Sometimes, I moved between provinces, where schools worked through the same curriculum in different sequences. As a result, I found myself repeating certain parts of the syllabus without ever becoming aware that other parts existed.
This led to some naïve and humorous encounters with learning.
Mathematics, for example, is taught linearly and progressively. At 11 years old, I couldn’t understand how equations worked—or how a mathematical question could be formulated using only a letter.
In one class, mathematics was:
1 + 1 = ?
In another, it was:
Find x.
Where? I wondered. What is the question?
I experienced a similar confusion around studying. I understood that I was sitting in a classroom in front of a teacher who was giving me information I needed to memorise so that I could earn good marks in a test. I could also surmise that if I repeated the information often enough, I would probably remember it.
What I couldn’t understand was how to learn in a way that created understanding.
What is this concept? What does this idea mean? How is it relevant to me? What am I supposed to do with it? How does one study—or do homework, exactly?
As I progressed through school, the pressure to perform increased. Good marks appeared to promise some kind of security beyond school, but the chaotic torrent of fragmented information that had come to define my experience of public education began to overwhelm me.
Eventually, I cracked under the pressure and tapped out almost entirely. I retreated from the social environment of direct learning and deep-dived into the world of books.
Writers Are Readers, First.
I liked books because they were heavy. Their weight and gravity made them feel reliable.
Whenever I moved homes and everything around me was changing, I created a ritual of stacking my favourite books beside my bed each night. I felt safe within their pages—as though a book contained the truest, realest, most sincere part of another human being, and I could communicate directly with that soul instead of constantly navigating the social anxiety of interpreting people’s motives and intentions.
So I read books. A lot of them.
Reading is how I learned to write.
All writers begin as readers. While all human beings constantly absorb information and integrate it into the thought processes through which they construct and perceive reality, a reader begins to become a writer when they stop simply consuming information and begin metabolising and directing it—shaping what they have absorbed into a story of their own design.
Because I struggled so much to understand how to study, I also had to learn how learning itself works. And because I struggled with social anxiety, I became especially interested in how people process information, make meaning and communicate their internal worlds to one another.
Over time, these two challenges gave me a particular understanding of how we absorb, metabolise and direct information until it becomes a story.
Like most skills, writing involves learning how to do something step by step—and then returning to those steps consistently enough for the process to become part of you. The fact that this did not come easily to me is what made me want to become a teacher. I felt that if I could learn, then everyone should have the chance to learn how to write and craft their stories in a way that feels fun, supportive, caring and playful.
Writers Train Their Minds to Write.
There is a Buddhist principle that says, “When life becomes too busy to meditate, that is precisely when you most need to meditate.”
The same is true of writing. To become a writer, you need to write. The busier you are, the more disciplined and devoted to the practice of creating time to write you’ll have to be.
Just as someone might train their body to run up a mountain, writers train their minds—and their nervous systems—to write books.
Running requires muscular and joint strength, coordination, endurance, presence and attention. Writing requires us to process and metabolise vast amounts of information, filter it through our minds and direct it through our hands into words on a page. Those words must then be shaped and arranged until they construct meaning for another person.
Like running, writing is not one skill. It is a collection of skills working together.
The good news is that these skills can be practised. And, really, with enough time, care, discipline and devotion, anyone can become a writer.
A grounding ritual that began as a way of navigating a chaotic childhood has remained with me into adulthood. Wherever I am—camping, on assignment or at home—I stack my favourite books next to my bed every night.
Three Types of Writing Practice:
The exercises we use to develop our writing abilities can be divided neatly into three categories:
1. Unstructured writing.
This includes stream-of-consciousness writing and Morning Pages, as popularised by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way.
The purpose is not to produce polished work. It is to practise allowing language to move freely, without immediately judging, editing or directing it.
Unstructured writing can help you clear mental clutter, notice recurring thoughts and develop a more natural relationship with your own voice.
2. Structured writing
Structured writing means directing your attention towards a topic or project of your choosing and working on it for a predetermined amount of time.
You might spend an hour developing one chapter of a memoir, drafting a short story or working through a particular scene. The purpose is to practise sustained attention and move a specific project forward.
3. Craft practice
Craft practice involves targeted exercises and cross-learning designed to develop your vocabulary, technique and personal style.
You might practise writing dialogue, building a character, describing a setting, structuring a narrative arc or experimenting with point of view. Instead of trying to produce an entire story, you isolate one skill and strengthen it through focused repetition.
A balanced writing practice makes room for all three modes: freedom, focus and technique.
Consistency Builds Skill Faster Than Intensity.
We benefit more from a small, consistent practice over time than from dramatic swings between intense productivity and complete inactivity.
It is more effective to write a little, frequently, than to write until you exhaust and deplete yourself, give up and struggle to return.
The quickest way to develop your skill is not to rush. It is to gradually and incrementally reduce the amount of time that passes between your encounters with the page.
Because introducing a regular writing practice requires a change in behaviour, it will eventually ask for a change in identity too.
This is one of the central principles behind mastering any skill: to keep doing the thing, you have to become the kind of person who does it.
I feel fortunate that my strange, chaotic and wonderfully unconventional upbringing embedded a strong sense of self-reliance in me from an early age. I never needed a school, institution or outside authority to validate me as a writer.
I am a writer because I write.
And you become a writer as you write.
Begin by Attaching Writing to Something You Already Do.
The beginning of any identity change is difficult. A new behaviour disrupts your existing routines and challenges the way you perceive yourself. Fortunately, there are ways to make that transition easier.
One useful method is habit stacking, a principle James Clear explores in Atomic Habits. The idea is simple: observe your daily routine as it currently exists, then attach the new behaviour you want to develop to something you already do consistently.
For me, that existing habit was my morning coffee.
Come rain or shine—even if a meteor shower were raining down upon my roof—you could be certain that, regardless of my mood, circumstances or workload, I would still have a cup of black coffee in the morning.
So, at the beginning of my professional writing practice, I attached writing to coffee.
Instead of picking up my phone and scrolling while drinking my first cup, I picked up my journal and practised 10 minutes of unstructured writing. Then I read a book for 10 minutes, practising focused attention. Finally, I wrote a short story, poem or essay in response to what I had read.
The sequence was simple:
Write freely.
Read attentively.
Respond creatively.
This is how my practice began.
Slowly, as my writing muscles strengthened, those few minutes grew into four or five hours of writing a day—and eventually into a career in journalism and storytelling.
Longer Projects Require Protected Time
As my skills developed and I began taking on longer-form projects, I needed a different kind of habit.
I am a self-employed entrepreneur, which means there is always something else to do: administration, marketing, reviewing stories, cleaning, networking, attending events, dawdling, faffing about and eventually collapsing into bed exhausted.
If I do not intentionally protect time for my own creative development, years can pass without me moving beyond Chapter Three of my memoir or the D-major scale in my music practice.
Long-form writing cannot depend entirely on inspiration or spare time. It requires an appointment.
Using a calendar and an alarm, I schedule focused writing time dedicated to a specific project. I might choose one hour, three times a week. This kind of steady commitment will always move a project further than irregular bursts of activity followed by long periods of avoidance.
Unless I take responsibility for clearing and protecting the time, the writing simply does not move forward.
This is part of what we practise in our eight-week course. We teach our nervous systems to make a commitment to creative work and to show up for it as we would for any other meaningful responsibility.
Skill Grows Through Community and Play
Individual discipline matters, but the most energising way to develop your writing is through community and play.
When you surround yourself with people who share similar values, interests and goals, writing becomes part of the culture around you rather than a private ambition you must continually defend.
If you want to become a writer—and a very good writer at that—begin with two things:
First, write.
Second, surround yourself with other writers.
Learn from one another. Soundboard ideas. Exchange feedback. Serve as accountability partners. Experiment, play and develop your skills together.
This is why we have created a creative-writing community that meets online every Tuesday from 13:00–14:00 SAST. During each 60-minute session, we learn something new, practise a focused craft exercise and exchange feedback with one another.
You can join the community chat here:
4-year-old me. Not much has changed. I still love denim dungarees. I still love books.
My own education may have arrived in fragments, but writing taught me how to gather fragments into meaning.
That is ultimately what a creative-writing practice allows us to do. We read and absorb. We write freely. We focus our attention. We practise specific skills. We return to the page consistently. And, in the company of other writers, we learn how to transform the scattered information of our lives into stories of our own design.
You do not need to begin with hours of free time, a perfect idea or permission from an institution.
Begin with 10 minutes.
Begin with the life you already have.
Begin by writing.
Our final 8-week Creative Writing Course for 2026 begins on the 14 October 2026 at Studio 26, Muizenberg. Email tanika@hatuakali-storytelling.org to book.
