New Daily Writing Guides from The Write Practice

How to Keep Writing After Failure

Writing a great story is hard. Every author worth his or her salt knows this from painful experience. And if you’re setting out to write something worthwhile, you’re going to encounter failure along the way. But that doesn’t mean you’re a failed writer.

Despite the temptation to give up or run away from writing again, you have to keep going. You have to keep writing.

Because the reward waiting for you is priceless. Not only that, the reward can only come from failure.

And it’s the ingredient that will make your story a must-read.

My AI-Assisted Writing Experiment: What Happened (and What I learned).

by Jamie Biggs | 0 Comments

There’s a growing divide in the writing world right now. On one side, you have authors excited about experimenting with AI. On the other, you have traditional writers who want nothing to do with it. The conversations can get heated fast, and often it feels like there’s no middle ground.

I wanted to know if there was room for compromise. Could AI help with speed while I protected the heart of the story? Could it serve as a tool instead of a replacement?

Kinesthesia: Definition and Examples for Writers

by Liz Bureman | 21 Comments

It’s kind of fun when words that refer to literary techniques have their origin in other disciplines. Take kinesiology, for example. I had several friends in college who were kinesiology majors, which means that they studied the science of human movement. That general idea of movement is also reflected in today’s new literary word: kinesthesia.

How to Write a Short Story: 5 Major Steps from Start to Finish

by Sarah Gribble | 82 Comments

Do you want to learn how to write a short story? Maybe you’d like to try writing a short story instead of a novel, or maybe you’re hoping to get more writing practice without the lengthy time commitment that a novel requires.

The reality of writing stories? Not every short story writer wants to write a novel, but every novelist can benefit from writing short stories. However, shorts stories and novels are different—so how you write them has, naturally, their differences, too.

Short stories are often a fiction writer’s first introduction to writing, but they can be frustrating to write and difficult to master. How do you fit everything that makes a great story into something so short?

And then, once you do finish a short story you’re proud of, what do you do with it?

That’s what will cover in this article—and additionally resources which I will link.

30 September Writing Prompts

by Sue Weems | 0 Comments

September marks the beginning of a new school year for many students around the U.S. New supplies, new goals, and a new opportunity to kick-start your writing habits! Here are 30 September writing prompts to get you started!

How to Write a Scene: The Definitive Guide to Scene Structure

by Joe Bunting | 2 Comments

Once you have a great story idea, the next step is to write it. But do you want to take your brilliant idea and then write a book that bores readers and causes them to quit reading your book?

Of course not. That’s why you need to learn how to write great scenes.

Scenes are the basic building block of all storytelling. How do you actually write them, though? And even more, how do you write the kind of scenes that both can keep readers hooked while also building to the powerful climax you have planned for later in the story?

In this post, you’ll learn what a scene actually is. You’ll explore the six elements every scene needs for it to move the story forward. Then, you’ll learn how to do the work of actually putting a scene together, step-by-step. We’ll look at some of the main scene types you need for the various types of stories, and we’ll also look at some scene examples so you can better understand how scenes work. Finally, we’ll put it all together with a practice exercise.

Inkitt Review: How I Found a Whole New Audience for My Novella

by Jamie Biggs | 1 Comment

Inkitt allows authors to publish stories for free on their site, and if your story connects, it can get picked up by Galatea—Inkitt’s reader app with a much wider (and more mobile-first) audience. Galatea adapts stories into serialized episodes with sound effects, pacing adjustments, and artwork, then promotes them on the app. That’s what happened with my short story, and it’s still wild to see it playing out on a professional platform like that.

The Secret Every Frustrated Writer Needs to Know

by Ruthanne Reid | 37 Comments

Are you frustrated with your writing? Tired of writing words you know aren’t as good as you want them to be? Frustrated writer, I know why.

A weird thing happens when we finally sit down to write The Book: we expect it to come out as magnificently as we think it should. We see or feel what it should be, and hey—we’ve read and written stuff all our lives, right? It should just come out!

But it doesn’t.

This is normal.

10 Memoir Writing Prompts to Get Your Life Story Started

by Joe Bunting | 3 Comments

Want to write a memoir but not sure how to get started? I’ve got you covered. In this post, I’m sharing my ten best creative writing prompts for memoir writers.

Write a Great Memoir: How to Start (and Actually Finish) Your First Draft

by Joe Bunting | 4 Comments

What does it take to write a memoir? Not just any memoir—a great memoir, one that people love and talk about and share with their friends?

In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good.

If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.

Here to learn? You’re in the WRITE place!