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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Readers want something that’s real. They want to live in your novel. They want to become your characters, and feel every joy and heartache right along with them. They want to see, smell, hear, feel, taste. Our struggle as the writer is to deliver to them what they want. Our careers and our very lives depend on how the readers feel. No pressure, right?
In the animation class I am taking, one of the first lessons on developing a character to animate, is to think about how the character stands. To develop the character through posture.
A hero is no hero at all unless there is something to stand against. That’s where villains come in.
villains
We love to hate them, but they serve a critical function within the anatomy of a story, the yin to your protagonist’s yang.
Sometimes, the readers you think you have actually turn out to be someone else. Knowing who they really are can be pivotal…not just in your writing, but in your marketing as well.
If there’s one significant thing that Joe and I have historically disagreed on, it’s the role of grammar in a writer’s toolbox. We complement each other well because as much as I love grammar and sentence structure, he equally embraces the dismissal of commas and the implementation of run-on sentences for art’s sake. When you get down to brass tacks though, I have to admit that he kind of has a point: grammar is somewhat arbitrary.
Of all the nuances of grammar in the English language, this is my greatest pet peeve. No, it’s not “its vs. it’s.” It’s not “there, their, and they’re.” It’s not even the Oxford comma.
Let’s talk conditional sentences.
Your story is going to be great. Your book? It’s going to be great. It’s going to get written. Don’t worry.
Breathe your story in. Breathe your story out.
Simon Whistler embodies the spirit of the do-it-yourself writer. In this Scrivener Superpowers interview, Simon and I talk about his editing process and how he came to book writing.
Twitter is a social media outlet that allows its users to send and read short messages up to 140 characters long. It’s perfect for the world we live in. Quick, easy, and simple for our constant moving lives.
This is a guest post from Harper Hodges. She writes at thecatwhowrites.com. Harper took over the cat who write’s blog when Pooh Hodges, a regular columnist for The Write Practice, died. Pamela Hodges, the regular writer today, is not a cat —so she asked Harper to help her write today’s post.
