Once you understand that the goal is not necessarily to write a story but only to move from one thought or image to the next by recognizing the direction and form of your ideas, producing a piece of creative writing suddenly becomes much more manageable. It is unreasonable to expect a student or anyone else to do produce something that he or she doesn't understand. Students must be shown that the process of creating a story is actually a process of putting together a series of images and thoughts in hopes of recognizing a form. As a rule, creative writing should always begin with an image or concept, and then move through a progression of surprises. Our brains are wonderful at recognizing forms and putting them in order.
Creativity is very much a matter of tying together loose ends and making connections.
In and of themselves they are nothing more than conglomerations of paint, of clay, of stone. It is our mind that allows us to perceive them as art. It is our mind that invents the art based on the material and forms with which the artist has presented us. It is true that a painter might use various materials to communicate a predetermined image to an audience, but it is also true that if there is no audience to recognize the image, then the painting in question is nothing more than a splattering of paint on canvas. To produce a piece of creative writing, then, we might devise the following steps.