@jeuhb

navyasarchive Answer:

1. Read a variety of books from different genres, both fiction and non-fiction. Become acquainted with the tools authors use to convey their points, whether those tools are figurative language, different styles of rhetoric, or modes of description, argumentation, analysis, or exemplification. Here is a good exercise that I learned from my sophomore English class in high school: take a book that is chock full of symbolic and figurative language and deconstruct it. I recommend reading Beloved by Toni Morrison if you want to practice this. The book is a beautiful classic filled to the brim with the right amount of surrealist language, but it is a difficult read for most people because it has so much symbolism, imagery, and figurative language. Beloved is a complex text because there are so many characters that function not exclusively as characters but as emblems of the overarching themes of the book or as metaphors for specific traumas or violences the characters go through. It’s also difficult for many people to read because Toni Morrison has such a command of language and rhetoric that she’s able to pack important symbols and images into mere sentences. It’s possible to write entire essays and analyses based on one paragraph of one page of the book, which is why I think reading it and annotating it and researching the names of different rhetorical, narrative, and language techniques that Toni used is a really good and productive task. 
2. If you haven’t already, take an academic writing class. Writing boring, blunt academic prose is often much harder for people who want to become creative writers because you can’t rely on flowery prose or metaphoric language in academic writing and analytical papers. If you can develop an original, independent voice through writing dry academic papers, you know you’ll be able to produce unique, quality creative writing and fiction. You also have to understand writing as an actual technique/discipline (not just writing as an art form/creative form) which involves learning about literary criticism, grammar and convention, and analyzing non-fiction forms of writing. 
3. Begin keeping up with the news regularly. Reading journalistic prose is immensely helpful to becoming any kind of writer, and being well-informed will assist you in whatever type of writing you do. Keeping up with the news broadens your perspective, exposes you to a variety of viewpoints, and forces you to deal with viewpoints that diverge from your own. In middle school I was very politically unaware and never read the news. My father used to make me read three political opinion-editorials from the New York Times and then summarize each article without giving my own opinion on the piece, regardless of whether I agreed with the piece or not. It went a great way not only in making me become politically aware on my own, but also helped me learn how to articulate and understand opposing viewpoints so that I could deconstruct them more readily. 
4. Write every day. You don’t have to write something beautiful every day, but try and write something daily. You can keep a journal and free-write in it. You can keep a diary of observations. My grandmother (who was an English professor) once told me to keep a diary and record beautiful language, new vocabulary words, and phrases that I’d come across, so you could do something like that as well. I write down my thoughts/opinions/beliefs on something daily but I’m also writing everyday because I’m a student. You should also try and read something new everyday. Again, it doesn’t have to be a book - you could read a few pages from a book daily, or an article, or a new poem, or something, but read something every day. 
5. When you begin writing whatever it is you want to write (a play, a poem, a personal narrative, a monologue, an essay, an article, a story), you should ask for feedback from friends, family members, and more professional sources (such as teachers or even fellow writers). Integrate their feedback as much as you can, taking care to distinguish between good feedback and less helpful feedback. Incorporate that feedback into your early drafts and use it to identify what areas you need work in and what areas you’re doing well in so that you know what you have to pay attention to in subsequent drafts. Eventually you should become accustomed to being your own feedback generator, such that you yourself can assess your work with a critical eye and immediately identify where you need to improve. Of course even when you reach that point you’ll need outside feedback, but you can’t reach that point without practice and scaffolding.