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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Many of the earliest forms of written literature that exist are religious texts, and most of us at some point in our schooling will study at least one type of ancient mythology, be it Greco-Roman, Egyptian, or Norse. I happened to be fascinated with all three at the age of ten. More than once in these stories do you run into a human mortal being raised to the status of a god. There is a name for this phenomenon, and it’s called apotheosis.
A synopsis is a summary of your manuscript. That’s it. You get a chance to answer the question “what’s your novel about?” in one single-spaced page in an omniscient narrative voice.
Why are some writers five, ten, or twenty times more productive than everyone else? Like superhumans, they somehow juggle the chainsaws of everyday life, yet still manage to consistently finish book after book while others struggle.
I have been a contributor here at The Write Practice for over a year. In that time, I’ve had the honor and the pleasure to get to know some of you. I’ve enjoyed writing every one of the posts published in my TWP stream and taking part in discussions and comments. But as all things eventually do, this too must come to an end. This is my last regular post.
The good news is, it’s not one of those “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” endings. It’s more like “I still love you but I have to go and I’ll write when I can.” Blame it on our solar system that only gives us twenty-four hours in a day. I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the Earth spin a little slower, but not even Elon Musk has been able to do that. So I’m taking an impermament bow.
One of the first things I remember from ninth grade English is discussing the origin of comedy and tragedy from the classical Greek plays. We read both Oedipus Rex and Antigone over the course of the next several years of English classes, and Shakespeare’s plays, both comic and tragic, made their way into the curriculum, as they have the tendency to in most high school English classes. I was in a production of As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known comedies. Even in those earliest forms of literature and theater, writers played with blending the elements of tragedy and comedy together. We call these blended works tragicomedies or dramedies.
Do you want to write a novel? Are you one of those people who has always dreamed of writing one, but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’ve started, but got lost somewhere in the middle? If you said yes to any of those questions, you’re in luck. You’re in exactly...
For a cat there are many dangerous things to be careful of. We are small and a car might not see us when we try to cross the road; we could be run over and killed. In our homes the humans who live with us might drop a piece of peanut butter toast on our head, and we could smell like peanuts. However, there is something more sinister than fast cars and peanut butter toast.
There is a danger that applies to writers, cats, and humans. The Danger Of Comparing Yourself.
If you follow a lot of writing blogs, you have probably heard a lot of the same tips about the finding-an-agent process. Here is some advice that you might not have heard before.
Good writers can express themselves thoughts. But with so much flowing through the chambers of the mind, it is not easy to concisely find just the right words to express and idea or emotion, or to narrate action.
What phrases convey to the reader exactly what the writer is thinking? How do you express yourself while keeping your reader following a logical description, dialogue or argument?
This weekend, I finally got around to seeing Into the Woods. Years ago, I saw the play the film is based on with my high school drama club on Broadway. Of course, because Into the Woods is a Disney film, there were a few things from the original musical that didn’t make it to the big screen (the fate of Rapunzel, the Baker’s Wife’s encounter with Cinderella’s Prince, etc.). Despite those changes, the overall theme of the musical remained intact.
