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.
And make sure to subscribe to get a weekly digest of our latest posts, along with our free guide, 10 Steps to Become a Writer.
For successful writers, there are three main components you need to really write: productivity, creativity, and inspiration. Without any one of these three, you’ll find writing difficult, but when they come together, you will find your writing will be better and maybe even a bit easier.
The things you eat and drink can have a significant effect on your writing. If you’re lacking productivity, creativity, or inspiration, pick one of these writing-enhancing foods and drinks for a boost.
If you are planning on writing a story, there is something you need to consider besides basic plot structure. You need to determine your Inciting Incident.
What incident will compel your protagonist to act, prompting them to move through a meaningful story?
Let’s take a look at what an inciting incident is and how to write one.
The first time I took up the NaNoWriMo challenge, I lost my first two days staring at a blank scene. I’d write a paragraph and then delete it. I’d get a couple sentences into a chapter and then change my mind. My writing was a disappointing mess.
By the third day, I was already so far behind my goal, I realized I was never going to catch up. I stuck it out for two more weeks, but then, discouraged and frustrated, I quit.
The second time I tried the NaNoWriMo challenge, my experience was different.
One preparation secret made all the difference in helping me start off on the right foot and actually finish my book.
Do you struggle with screenplay structure? Especially sustaining momentum in that long second act?
When learning how to write a script, writers are overwhelmingly taught that screenplay structure is all about three acts. The problem with this three act formula, however, is that it often leads to writers running out of steam in act two as they try to fill it with “conflict.” This means act two becomes a series of disconnected events that aren’t really connected and seem to exist just for the sake of “things happening.”
This happens when screenwriters focus too much on traditional three act structure and ignore the building blocks underneath each act—sequences.
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.