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.
I’m taking a really interesting class with a woman named Maxine Clair about how to be present in your life and writing about it.
This week we learned about narrative writing and how to start your story. We were taught five ways to begin a narrative story that I thought would be useful to the Write Practice community.
Use these ten short story ideas to write your first ten stories, one per week, over the next ten weeks. I promise you, you’re life will look totally different if you do it.
Several weeks ago I wrote a story for The Write Practice about the hidden value of a handwritten letter. In my file, labeled Letters, I found a thirty-year old letter from Tokyo. The letter was addressed to me, at The Tokyo Journal, the magazine where I worked as a photographer and graphic designer in Tokyo, Japan in 1985.
There’s no feeling quite like the moment you realized you’ve completely finished the rough draft of a work in progress. A mix of pride and accomplishment and utter dread at how bad it might be.
During moments when my natural enthusiasm for the craft of writing wanes, it’s useful to have a secret weapon to draw from my arsenal that reinvigorates my mind and makes me excited about working again.
That secret weapon is the certain knowledge that writers have superpowers.
You want to write, but the words don’t come.
You want to write, but you’re utterly blocked.
Writer’s block can occur because you let self-criticism obstruct the easy flow of thoughts from your brain to your writing fingers. It’s akin to hardening of the arteries.
Here are some of the ways using all five senses can enhance your descriptive writing.
Have you ever sat down to write, full to the brim of creative energy, but found that you can’t think of a single idea? In my opinion, it’s one of the most frustrating feelings. Luckily there are ways to get around this. Instead of trying to come up with something totally original, why don’t you use stories that have already been written to your advantage? If you’re ever lacking in inspiration, consider using one of these three tips to easily “steal” an idea.
Words. As writers, we pound them out by the minute, fuss over every adjective, and worry over every comma. In fact we go through so many of them that they sometimes begin to feel meaningless. But if there was ever a person to remind us of how incredibly powerful words can be, Martin Luther King, Jr., is it.
Confession time. How much exercise have you done today? How about yesterday? Over the course of the past week?
And why am I talking about exercise on a website for writers?
Because getting your body up and moving is good for your plotlines.