Let’s be honest: it’s hard breaking habits, especially when it comes to bad writing habits. Writing is a career that requires a lot of self-motivation. In other words, it’s the perfect breeding ground for procrastination, distractions, and a world of other bad writing habits stalling your time to write.
But there’s hope! The best way to break bad writing habits is to first recognize that 1) you have them and 2) put forth the conscience effort needed to protect your time for writing. Here’s what I consider the three worst writing habits—and how to break them.
How long does it take to write a book? Writing the first draft of a book is a grueling, intimidating process. But it doesn’t have to be a slow process.
Ask one hundred writers how long it takes them to write their first drafts and you’ll get one hundred different answers. There is no perfect length of time to spend on a first draft.
You will find, though, that the writers whose answer is closer to a couple of months than to a couple of years are most likely more successful.
Have you ever started a story, gotten halfway through, and realized you don’t know key facts about your story’s world? Have you ever wondered how to find out the size of spoons in Medieval England for your fantasy adventure story? Is that even relevant to your plot, or could you skip that fact? Here’s how to do research for your story.
You’re writing a paper for school and suddenly you stop in the middle of the sentence. You have to write a book title but you don’t how to format it? How do you format a book title in MLA? Good news: you’re in the write place (sorry, I had to).
In this post, we’ll talk about MLA style and formatting, whether it’s appropriate for your project, and most importantly, how to write a book title in MLA.
I’m going to be honest. When I first started writing, I thought keeping track of my writing progress was ridiculous. How many words I wrote in a day or how frequently I wrote depended on my mood and whether that elusive muse showed up. Besides, wasting time tracking and analyzing how much I’d written during a week seemed like just another way to procrastinate and not get any writing done at all.
I don’t say this often, so listen up:
I was wrong.
Writers need to track their writing progress, period. It’s that simple. Read on for why and how to get tracking today.
The choices your characters make within your story are shaped by their past, which means sometimes, you’ll need to communicate to your reader events that happened before your story began. Not sure how? Try memory or backstory to share the past in the present.
Hey writers. Well, it’s been a weird, hard, interesting year, right? The good news is 2020 is almost over (thank goodness), and as we start looking ahead to 2021, I want to hear from you. What are you struggling with as far as your writing goes? How can The Write Practice help you?
In college, I majored in communication, and the first thing I learned is that communication is a two-way street—it needs a sender and a receiver. As writers, we are senders, and our readers are receivers. But what are we communicating?
Stories, at their core, are a medium for communicating many things, but chief among them is emotion. That means one of the best ways to hook your reader is through emotion.
In this post, you will learn how to hook your reader with emotion, how people experience emotion through reading and three tips to cultivate that emotion through your writing. Then, we’ll end with a creative writing exercise you can use to apply these lessons right away.
Writing a novel in a month is a wonderful idea. But it’s hard for a multitude of reasons, and the temptation to give up and just “do it over time” can be really appealing, especially as we approach Day 8 of the journey.
I know it’s hard. But quitting, or choosing to simply abstain, is the worst thing you can do right now if you have a passion for writing.
We’ve all heard of passive vs. active sentences. Active sentences such as “three men stood by the gate” are more attractive and interesting than passive sentences such as “there were three men standing by the gate.”
But the concept of active vs. passive can also be applied to scenes within a story. Appropriate use of active and passive scenes can give your story an extra kick of life and can help with pacing as well.
Both villains and monsters are considered antagonists, but there are differences between the two. You’ll want to choose which version of antagonist you’re using based on the purpose and tone of your story.
Everyone loves a good underdog story. In some ways, we can all relate to the downtrodden character who rises against insurmountable odds. And the requisite feel-good ending is as sweet and satisfying as a warm cup of cocoa at the end of a cold and bitter day.
The underdog plot is a sure-fire recipe for a story readers can care about, invest in, and cheer on towards a rewarding conclusion. Plus, it can be a lot of fun to write. Read on to learn more about how to craft an underdog story that will ring your reader’s happy bell.
There is a book inside you. There has to be. Why else are you reading a post about writing a book?
Getting that book out, of course, is the extremely difficult part. The words don’t come out as we imagine. The time to write shrinks as life gets busier. And so many questions vex us — so many lies that we tell ourselves to avoid the challenge ahead.
But you have to write your book. It’s one of the greatest driving forces in your life. Here are the lies that might be holding you back, and the truths you need to overcome them.
In life and in writing, romance is a difficult and yet extremely enticing subject. Even in books outside the highly popular romance genre, romantic subplots are immensely popular. But romance is not an easy thing to write, because readers want more than just a straight-up kiss-and-get-married.
A romance on a curved, nuanced road, where your characters have to fight to get to their happily ever after, makes for a much better story. The best way to achieve this is through romantic tension.
I’m a firm believer in Halloween. But I know all the gore and scary movies aren’t for everyone, especially little kids.
Halloween is for everyone, though! There’s so much more to the celebration than jump scares and fake blood. And I think we all need a little lightheartedness this year.
Have your kids try one of these writing prompts (or try one yourself)!
Writing is communication. It requires a giver and a receiver. A writer and a reader. While there’s a lot to be said for the value of private writing—diary and journal-keeping, therapeutic ventings on paper, and the like—writing, at its heart, is meant to be shared.
Is there anything more awkward than looking at the document you approved or the email you sent and finding a bunch of obvious typos?
It isn’t just professional writers and indie authors who need a good editor. Luckily, these days, there are a bunch of great spelling and grammar checkers you can try.
One popular spelling and grammar checker is Ginger. In this article, we’ll look at Ginger and review its pros and cons, and see if the tool is right for you.
I’d love to come up with a yarn that grabs people like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games did. Doing so would practically guarantee a large and loyal fanbase for years!
Yet writing this kind of story is deceptively difficult. The story we want to write is always a good one in our own minds. But when we put the words on the page, they rarely possess the page-turning qualities we imagined they would.
Thankfully, there’s a way to set yourself up for success. Here’s how to write a novel that readers can’t put down!
The best way to immerse your readers in your fantasy story is through world-building, which can be an arduous and intimidating process. After all, to create an entire world is no easy task.
But what if you don’t want to spend a lot of time world-building? The key lies in lore. Lore is defined as “a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.”
Some of you may be participating in our 100 Day Book program, writing your first novel on your own, or kicking around the idea of starting that manuscript.
Writing your first novel is hard. It’s a struggle. It’s a learning process.
And it’s often autobiographical, even if you don’t mean it to be. And that’s okay.
