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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In the last few weeks, we asked you to tell us about what you’re writing. Many of you are in the middle of writing a book, and many more would like to start one. Writing a book is an awesome goal, and we want to support you in every way we can.
That’s why we’re so excited to announce our brand-new program: Write a Book in 100 Days.
This program is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Let me explain how it will virtually guarantee that you finish your book in 100 days.
Let’s say you’re living the dream and writing a chapter of word problems for a grade school math textbook. You’ve got a girl named Mandy who has sixteen apples. You’ve got a guy named Frank who has four fewer apples than Mandy.
Wait. Is it four fewer or four less?
Let’s discuss, shall we?
I have a theory why the Olympics are so exciting (despite all the Zika gloom and doom leading up to them). It’s the stories!
So much is at stake every day of the Olympics. The veteran Olympian hoping to clinch his last medal, the refugee who went from swimming for her life to swimming for gold, the gymnast finally getting her shot on the world stage.
Since the Olympics provide such great material for story writing, they obviously provide great material for writing prompts.
For writers, as well as athletes, there’s nothing like being in the zone. Distractions fall away, time disappears, and your work seems to write itself. Unfortunately for most writers, being in the zone is rare—instead of inspiration, we feel dread; instead of knowing, we feel lost; and instead of excitement, we feel anxiety.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, according to the research of Susan Perry, Ph.D., there are several concrete writing techniques and practices that can actually make finding inspiration and “getting into the zone” an everyday occurrence.
Don’t you just hate being told what to do? I hate it. Absolutely hate it. However, I am going to tell you if you want to be a writer, you need to be a reader too.
I know. I know. Who has time to read, right? We are busy with life, writing all day, getting caught up on our favorite television shows, cleaning seven litter boxes every morning, and washing our socks. Who has time to read?
But if you are a writer, you need to read.
They lurk in dark corners of our houses when everyone else is asleep. We see their shadows at the other end of that abandoned alley where the street lamps are broken. They watch us in the woods, close enough to feel but still hidden by the gloom.
I’m talking about monsters. The kind that go bump in the night and leave a chill running up our spines.
When we build terrifying monsters into our stories, they will ingrain themselves in our readers’ minds, making our stories unforgettable.
Why do readers suddenly have the attention spans of gnats?
It’s easy to blame writers and suggest their quality of work has declined, but I contend there’s a growing evil sucking attention away from the page. This villain takes many forms.
I hold responsible the brilliant innovators, creators and storytellers of our generation for producing the most competitive market place for readers’ attention that the world’s ever seen. Fewer and fewer people can make it through an entire page before departing and plugging back into their easy-to-consume content outlets.
This new reality means you must write smarter than ever to seize attention and audience engagement. You must be calculated in how you connect with readers.
Writing is a tricky business. We throw ourselves into it, gripped by passionate ideas and the need to speak them. We persevere when haters tell us to stop, push through when our own limitations creep up like fences to be hurdled, and devour articles offering tips on how to write better, faster, and smarter.
In the middle of all that, is it any wonder that sometimes we feel like we’re crazy?
Today, we’re not going to work on the fiction side of writing. Today, we’re going to work on ourselves. Think of this as a writer’s personal-training workout.
Sometimes we need to revisit the basics. We should never assume that we’re above them; there’s a reason that the saying “pride comes before a fall” is still common.
And there is little that brings a writer’s soaring and magnificent prose crashing back to earth faster than using the wrong form of there/their/they’re.
Today, let’s look at these three very different words.
Three weeks ago, I accepted a challenge to finish my book by September 2, and if I miss my deadline, I have to give $1,000 to the presidential candidate I despise. I’m three weeks into the challenge, and I’ve finished nine chapters so far for a total of 42,000 words.
It wasn’t hard to finish nine chapters, since I started the challenge with a little less than 30,000 words already written. However, since then I’ve written about 12,000 words, or about 600 per day.
Let’s go a little deeper to see what is working and what isn’t.
