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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Ray Bradbury famously wrote a story a week. It was impossible, he insisted, to write 52 bad stories in a row. Bradbury is one of my writing heroes, so this is an approach I admire and strive to emulate. So when I found a quote from Bradbury on Pinterest offering some...
Sometimes after people learn I’m a writer, they confess to me in private they have a book inside them. They dream about it and long to make that happen. I know others who talk a lot about writing. They post writerly quotes on social media, links to publishing articles and always know the latest industry buzz. Another set are voracious readers; they can discuss a variety of cool topics or brainstorm story ideas. They love the whole literary scene.
What all these folks share in common is…
In my last post I talked about the writer’s retreat I attended recently taught by Wild author Cheryl Strayed. I learned so much about writing stories from hearing her speak, including how to lean into subjectivity, and I plan to share as much with you as possible.
Today’s Lesson from Cheryl Strayed: How to use everyday objects to imbue your stories with meaning.
I came across Jack Kerouac’s list of thirty “Beliefs and Techniques for Modern Prose,” and unsurprisingly, if you’ve read Kerouac, it’s less of a list of techniques and more a poetic riff on the writing life itself.
Some of my favorites are, “Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind,” and (of course), “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition,” and, “Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven.”
Here’ the full list…
I’ve discovered that no matter what so-called good writers say, if you want to write a good and commercial novel, there’s nothing more important than structure.
Here are four more crucial storytelling techniques I’ve learned from the fast and formulaic world of television.
Why are we here? I mean, have you really ever thought about it? Not in a passing way, like what you are going to get at the grocery store tonight, but in a deep earth-shattering way?
I have been thinking about it and I have this feeling that we aren’t hapless creations put on the earth to eat, talk, and die. I feel like we were put here for a purpose, to make it better. We are here to change the world.
As if writing a complete draft for a novel wasn’t hard enough—now you have to go back and face what you’ve created. No matter how seasoned a writer you are, the revision process is an emotional roller coaster, full of extreme and sometimes unexpected highs and lows....
There seems to be two different camps regarding the writing process. One adheres to a strict regime of rules to achieve success: you must write everyday, you must show your work to others, you must produce X amount of pages in X amount of time. The other camp seems to believe in no rules: do whatever you want, whenever you want.
For several years I have thought about writing my memoir.  But, I wasn't really sure how to proceed. Was I supposed to write about every mouse I had ever caught? Do I start my story where I was captured in an alley during a rain storm? I was desperate to find out how...
This week I am at a five-day writer’s retreat taught by Cheryl Strayed, the author of the critically-acclaimed, Oprah-stamped, book-turned-movie Wild.
If you are a Cheryl fan, then I’m here to tell you that she is as awesome as she appears to be in her book and Dear Sugar advice columns. She’s as engaging a speaker as she is a writer, and her lessons and writing prompts are so inspiring I now have ideas for two new essays and a plan to make my novel stronger.
It’s only been two days, and it’s impossible for me to share everything, but over the next series of posts I’m going to try.
The first lesson I learned from Cheryl Strayed: Lean Into Subjectivity.
