At The Write Practice, we publish a new article each day designed to help writers tackle one part of their writing journey, from generating ideas to grammar to writing and publishing your first book. Each article has a short practice exercise at the end to help you immediately put your learning to use.
Check out the latest articles below or find ones that match your interest in the sidebar.
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If you’re a writer, you’ve likely heard advice that one of the best ways to improve your craft is to read. It’s true! But the way you read matters. How can you read and discuss books with a writer’s eye, so you get more out of the experience?Â
Last Wednesday through Sunday, I went to Reykjavik with some friends thanks to Groupon. Fortunately, the jet lag hasn’t hit much since coming home, but it was a great weekend. We saw the Northern Lights, we saw waterfalls, we saw geysers, and we saw a place where two tectonic plates meet.
By the way, that last text pattern, with the repetition of “we saw”, is what’s called anaphora.
For many writers, November used to be synonymous with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). Over thirty days, writers would knuckle down and attempt to write a 50,000 word novel. Just thirty days of work for a complete first draft? Awesome.
Unfortunately, NaNoWriMo has now closed its doors. But don’t worry, NaNoWriMo isn’t the only way to join a community and work toward all your writing goals. Here are five excellent alternatives to help you smash your word count goal before the end of the year.
If you’re like most writers I hear from, you’re probably wondering how to sell your book to a publisher. Publishing is a strange and mysterious industry, and it can be very hard to find your way through it so you can achieve your writing goals. You’re in the right place though, because often, the very first step on your journey to publishing your book is writing a book proposal.
How to write a book proposal, though? In this article, we’re going to talk about how to write a book proposal for both nonfiction and fiction writers. We’ll also look at when you need to write one. And at the end, there will be a fun exercise that will help you get started writing your book proposal.
Creative nonfiction is a literary genre of writing that uses fiction techniques and stylistic choices to express real-life experiences. It depends on story elements especially, so everything you’ve learned about structure will serve you well in creative nonfiction.Â
Life is filled with stranger-than-fiction moments. You might be wondering, though, how do you know how to write a book based on a true story? Because in practice, it’s much harder than it sounds, right?
Writing is a solitary profession for the most part, but sooner or later, we realize we need a network of people, from beta readers to editors and eventually readers. Some writers retreat, discouraged by unkind comments or unsupportive friends or family, believing that someday, somehow their work will reach a wider audience.
But writing alone and hard work aren’t enough by themselves. Very few writers can write and launch a book and career entirely in isolation. (Plus, being a part of a writing or creative community is much more fun.)
Here are a few small steps for finding, joining, or building a writing community.
Writing a book is hard. I’ve written seven books and at some point during each one I had the thought, “There has to be a tool, a piece of book writing software, that would make this easier.”
Bad news/good news: writing a book will always be hard, and the best piece of writing software in the world won’t write your book for you. But the good news is there is book writing software that can make the process a little easier.
In this post, we will cover the ten best pieces of software for writing a book and look at the pros and cons of each.
Do you remember the first time you read Romeo and Juliet? Did you cringe when Romeo kills himself, knowing that Juliet is still alive? This is a perfect example of how to use dramatic irony in your story—a literary device that will inevitably add suspense into your novel.Â
Dramatic irony can be used in any story regardless of genre, but it is especially useful when writing stories that you want to increase tension and suspense.Â
In this article, you’ll learn about dramatic irony, another useful technique that keeps readers on the edge of their seats.
Recently Joe asked me to be the World Impact Director for The Write Practice—a fancy title for making sure we stay involved in helping writers across the globe. Details of our first project will be coming soon, but until then, I wanted to share with you a few other ways I believe our writing can change the world, starting with these sixteen story ideas for world-changing writers.