Thunderstorm
PRACTICE
Write about thunderstorms.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments. If you post your practice, please comment on a few other practices.
Every Writer’s Dream: Interview with Jeff Goins
Today, I’m excited to be talking to my good friend, Jeff Goins, who writes the blog goinswriter.com. Jeff has been writing for years, but he recently had some huge breakthroughs: He built a blog from nothing to thousands of subscribers in a year. He guest posted for some of the most respected blogs on the web, like Zen Habits, the Huffington Post, and Copyblogger. He published articles in several magazines. And he got a book contract. Not a bad year for a writer.
Jeff recently released an ebook called You Are a Writer in which talks about how a change in mindset led to all of these breakthroughs. If you’re serious about improving your craft and getting published, you’re going to appreciate this interview.
Show Off Writing Contest: Dissent Edition
Once a month, we stop pracÂticÂing and invite you to show off your best work.
Are you interested in being published (in print)? Would you like to get better at the writing craft by working with an editor? Do you enjoy a little friendly competition? And are you a fan of The Write Practice?
Then this writing contest might be for you.
C.S. Lewis on the Dirty Secret of Language
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
The Worst Birthday
PRACTICE
Yesterday was my birthday. So I thought, Why don’t we write about birthdays?
But as I tried to write about my nice, happy birthday, I realized, Happy birrthdays are boring!
Instead, let’s write about the worst birthdays we (or our characters) ever had.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post be sure to give feedback to a few other Practitioners.
