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.
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At some point, your life as a writer will turn upside down.
The problems may come from health issues, from financial strain, from emotional stress, from relationship trouble, from any and every corner. It may come from the 500th rejection from an agent, from an unwelcome review or critique, or from plain old writer’s block.
Wherever it comes from, whatever turns your writing life upside down, I want you to be ready.
I finished the first draft of my 300-page novel in six months. I’m just a regular person. Therefore, if I can do it, you can do too.
Want to start—and finish—writing your novel in just six months? Here’s the process you need to do it. Whether you like to outline every last detail of your novel before you start writing or prefer to fly by the seat of your pants and discover the story as you go, these five steps will set you up for novel-writing success.
Happy October! Fall is here, and that means one thing for me: NaNoWriMo season.
What is NaNoWriMo? It stands for National Novel Writing Month. It’s a yearly event in November where writers all around the world set out to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Insane, right?
It sounds crazy, and it is, but it’s very doable! You just need to have the right tools at your fingertips. But not all writers are the same. We have very different approaches to writing from each other. Luckily, there are lots of tools at your fingertips to help you reach your goal. Here are five different types of NaNo-ers and the tools they might use.
If you live in the United States, there is a good chance your television was tuned in to the Presidential debate on Sunday night.
Regardless of your politics, the conversation likely brought a cocktail of anxiety and frustration mixed with joy and elation. At one second you felt the warmth brought by the anticipation of victory and then, suddenly, the dull pain of possible defeat.
As writers, these are the emotions we want readers to experience when they engage in our stories. We want them to become as emotionally invested as they do with a political debate.
Today, rather than focusing on who won or lost the actual debate, let’s use what we watched as inspiration for our writing.
If you’re anything like me, you hope in your heart of hearts that your writing will reveal a Great Truth to your readers, that it will open a doorway to compassion and understanding that will ripple out to change the world. Ah!
The authors who have been most effective in ushering me to that doorway are those whose writing reveals connections between images, ideas, and sensations I otherwise would have missed. Like Annie Dillard’s terrific simple line: “The air bites my nose like pepper.”
How did Dillard come up with such a lively sentence, one that bridges two physical sensations (cold and biting) and scent (pepper)? And how can we play around with unlike sensations to create similes that shine?
Over the next month, there is one rule I want you to keep as the foundation of everything you do during the month of November: Write it anyway.
I know how difficult this is. The inner critic gets vicious during NaNoWriMo, especially right around the middle of the month.
But your inner critic is a jerk. You can’t listen to it because the inner critic’s goal is not to make you a better writer. Your inner critic is trying to get you to quit.
Don’t quit. Write it anyway.
This November, writers from all over the world will be joining together to accomplish a great enterprise, writing a novel in a month!
That’s right, National Novel Writing Month is almost here, and smart writers know, now is the time to start preparing. (If you’re a Write Practice reader, I know you must be a smart writer.)
A couple weeks ago I road tripped to Franklin, Tennessee, for our friend Jeff Goins’s most recent Tribe Conference.
The Tribe Conference is an annual gathering of writers who want to grow in their craft and business in the midst of community. It was an incredible experience with unforgettable people.
Here are the seven lessons I learned that weekend.
Jill and Kate were singing “Behind These Hazel Eyes” at a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles when Kelly Clarkson walked in. They ended up singing as backup singers for her for six years until they stepped out from the back of the stage to the front of the stage, singing their own songs.
I love their sound, and their original lyrics.
I was so curious to know how they wrote their songs—how they do what they do, how they create their music.
Singers are writers. Writers who sing their words. I want to introduce Jill and Kate to you and to share their writing process. It might be helpful to you if you write songs, or would like to write songs.
I am addicted to novels I can’t put down, to TV shows I can’t just watch one episode of, to short stories I have to finish, and to movies that keep me guessing until the very end.
I love stories that grip me and demand my attention. I am on an unending hunt for them and for the suspense they make me feel.
As a writer, these are the types of stories I hope to create—stories that pull the reader to the edge of his seat and keep him there until the last page.
Let’s take a look at three tools you can use in your stories to build suspense and keep your readers engaged.
