Creative writing for beginners

I recently was asked why I write and responded with, "It’s my soul speaking to me." It got me thinking of all the reasons why.  So with that, in a stream of consciousness I will share so that students and budding writers recognize if these attributes reside within them, they need to take a leap. 

First of all, I need to tell a story. It's an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don't always know when or where I’ll begin. That will come later. I've discovered that all the stories I've told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I'm talking about a woman during the Victorian era that leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I'm really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I've gone through in my own life, escaping from a conservative family and going out into the world.

It’s an intuitive process.  Those times when I don’t have a plan; I'm not looking ahead. I'm looking only at what I'm doing, and then I realize, here I am lost in a forest, in England so I guess I must have been running.

My ideas come from the world. I harvest them but I don't have to conjure them up. All I have to do is take things I've seen – things people have said to me, things I've researched, artifacts from the world – and convert them into sequences of words that people will want to read. It's alchemy, a kind of magic.

Long before I started writing, I enjoyed telling stories and holding the attention of an audience. By the time I was a youngster I was elaborating on legend mixed with fiction and putting it into my own words, telling stories to friends.  I discovered that I could keep other kids on the edge of their seats. And in doing so, I found myself that way.