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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We all long for independence. It’s hard-wired into the human spirit.
Perhaps this is because we all know what it feels like to be trapped. Have your circumstances ever penned you in? Have you ever been forced to look to something or someone else for sustenance, when you would rather be standing on your own feet?
That’s what today’s writing prompt is all about.
Being a creator means getting your content out there to a target audience, and one of the best ways is through social media channels if you want to reach your readers directly. Here’s some practical advice on social media for writers.
Luckily, it’s actually much easier than you might think. Let’s take a look at the best ways for an author to use four of the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Today I want to talk about fear. Fear of writing, fear of sharing your work, fear of publishing—and how you can overcome it.
Writers face fear on a day-to-day basis.
The self-doubt. The fear of failure. And, oh, the vulnerability.
Writing is hard enough with all the self-evaluation and doubt about your abilities. But then sharing your work with other people so they can critique or review it? CRINGE.
When you sink into that fear it debilitates you. If you let fear hold you back, you’re ensuring you never achieve your goals. You’ll never write that book and you’ll never get published. All because you were too scared.
If you’re like most writers I know, you probably dream of getting published. But as I’ve worked with writers for the last six years, I’ve found that most are woefully unprepared for what publishing actually takes, and this means that either they never figure out what it takes to get published or when they finally DO get published, they find themselves disappointed with the process and with how many books they sell.
How do you prepare for getting published though? There are several steps, but the first step is building an author website. In this article, I’m going to share a step-by-step guide to building a simple author website yourself that will support all of your publishing efforts.
The Hero’s Journey is easily the most-used and most-loved storytelling structure in the history of humanity. It resonates with readers in ways that are as old as human D.N.A. itself.
If you want to connect with readers and engage them on a deep level, you would be at an advantage to study this storytelling method and use as much of it as possible in your writing.
One of the best ways to study and master the Hero’s Journey is by seeing it at work in another story. And in recent history, there is no clearer use of the Hero’s Journey than George Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars.
Let’s break it down, step by step.
What do JK Rowling, Christopher Paolini, David Eddings, and Terry Goodkind have in common? They all wrote bestselling novels starring orphans. And this isn’t unique to fantasy. Orphans in literature is a big theme!
Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain all used orphans as some of their most memorable characters.
And don’t forget Superman.
In this post, we’re looking at more than fifty fictional orphans, why authors love writing about them, and whether or not you should include them in your story.
“In fiction, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motivations with clarity… people read fiction—to come to some understanding of why other people act the way they do.”
The question is, do you understand why your characters do the things they do? And are you conveying that understanding to the reader in an interesting way?
Euphemistic language is everywhere in polite society, used to speak and write sensitively about taboo subjects or to tackle difficult situations.
Parents sometimes refer to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex when speaking to their kids.
Euphemisms can make it both easier and harder to talk about uncomfortable topics, so they can be used in interesting ways in literature.
Perhaps you’ve heard the old publishing proverb: The first page sells the book; the last page sells the next book. I’m convinced there’s a mammoth grain of truth in that. The beginning and the end of any story are critical elements that you really want to nail.
Today, we’re going to focus on how to start a story—in other words, how you can craft a spectacular beginning that will hold readers spellbound and get them to turn that first all-important page.
Young adult novels have never been more popular. It started with the rise of Harry Potter and continued with hits like The Fault in Our Stars, The Hunger Games, and Divergent. Have you ever wondered how to write a YA novel?
Learning how to write fiction is one thing, but writing for teens is a whole different ball game. As a teen and an avid YA reader myself, I have a few tips for you.
