Creativity Tutorial: How to Find Inspiration to Create Stories

Learn how to build your own writing process, with Alberto Chimal

Forget about the old clichés, inspiration is nothing more than a good idea turned into something concrete after lots of work and constant effort. This is one of the lessons from writer and teacher Alberto Chimal (@albertochimal), who offers a solution to anyone who suffers from creative block: practice, practice, and practice some more.

In the tutorial below, this creator of stories for adults and children, film scripts, and other formats and finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, presents tips that will help you get into a creative flow, using simple everyday elements to inspire you. Find out more in the video:

5 steps to build a writing process

1. Turn anecdotes, news, places and people into starting points

If you lack original ideas, train your brain to pay attention to good stories that people tell you, to news that can lead to a story, to places that can provide the common thread of a literary creation. Great novels do not appear by magic in the heads of their writers; they are built from pieces of facts, situations, memories, and a lot of observation.

2. Consistency and practice are essential

Although there are cases in the history of literature of great writers who started late, it is proven that, like in any other area of human knowledge, literary work requires perseverance and practice. Try to set writing goals–and to meet them. There is no better way to achieve excellence than to train.

3. Don't hesitate to change items that don't work well

Almost as important as the writing itself is the fine-tuning. Follow your instincts: if some point in your story does not convince you, do not hesitate to change it. Rewrite anything that seems unnecessary, incoherent, or simply uninteresting. Trust your own criteria when evaluating the story, try to see it from a more distant perspective.

4. Learn how to recognize when the story ends

When you have already forgotten the main topic itself and instinctively deal only with the details and the finish, that means that the story is already over. Don't insist on adding items forever. "It's very easy to perpetually correct, revise, without ever finishing a story. When you can no longer see the forest for the trees, that is the time to stop," explains Chimal. Perfectionism without a practical purpose will only hold you back.

5. You learn more from mistakes than from successes

If you write an unsatisfactory story, don't feel bad; it will surely be the necessary impulse to create better ones. Although we are all capable of telling stories, no one is born knowing how to write them. Identify the weak points in your stories and keep on writing. You will surely learn from your own process.

Did you like these tips? Remember that you can learn with Alberto Chimal the basics to writing memorable stories in his online course 'Introduction to Narrative Writing'.

You may also like:

- Narrative Techniques for Children's Books, a course by Natalia Méndez
- Narrative Techniques for Illustrated Stories, a course by Paula Bossio