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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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.
As the editor of a genre fiction website, I’ve seen my share of short stories—the good and the bad.
No matter what kind of fiction you write, being able to craft a good short story can help you sharpen your skills. Ray Bradbury recommended writing one short story a week—it seemed to work out pretty well for him.
Creative as we might be, sometimes our imaginations dry up.
Our scene might happen in a coffee shop, but the coffee shop in our heads is ghostly. In it, people don’t talk, don’t move, don’t even have faces!
And that, well, is creepy.
If you subscribe to as many writing websites as I do, I’m sure you’re constantly bombarded by the same advice: Just write, write every day, push through writer’s block, don’t wait for inspiration, etc. And while that’s all great advice, and most of the time very necessary to follow, there’s something to be said for taking a break.
When you write a story, please use your senses.
Often writers just write about what they see and ignore their other four senses. In addition to your ability to see you also have your sense of smell, of hearing, of taste, and touch. Unfortunately, your senses are not as keen as a cat, but no one can have everything. I can hear better than humans, but you have thumbs.
So much of what most of us consider to be good writing requires the writer to create a believable scene and realistic characters—or if not believable and realistic, close enough so that the reader willingly suspends their disbelief. Today’s article and corresponding writing practice is all about throwing those rules out the window by writing about weirdos.
On my personal blog, I write a lot about the publishing industry and how books (especially by women) are marketed. It made me start to seriously wonder—should I use a pseudonym/pen name? Should you?
Let’s figure it out.
Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.
—Maya Angelou
In his book, 10 Steps to Becoming a Writer, Joe Bunting that the first step to is to publish your work.
I agree with him, but often our emotional experiences can block us from publishing. When we approach publishing, we often experience doubt, fear, insecurity and all the other difficult feelings that come with opening ourselves up to feedback from others.
I can produce my blog posts, copywriting or magazine articles on time and in abundance. No problem. However, I’m turtle s-l-o-w in writing my novels. In eighteen years, I’ve only completed four—all still unpublished. To me, only the last two are worthy to be on a bookshelf; the first two were teaching me how to write.
I’ve always sort of felt like a loser writer because of this, but a recent epiphany taught me why failure in your writing is good…
With the start of 2015, everyone is in the midst of making and (hopefully) following through on their New Year’s resolutions. One of mine, in addition to going to the gym (which I’ve already hurt myself doing), is to resume journaling on a semi-regular basis. I used to be a religious journaler about five years ago, but I’ve moved away from the practice, mostly because I keep forgetting/watching episodes of the West Wing on Netflix. Since then, I’ve received two more blank journals as gifts, so I take this as a sign that the universe wants me to pick up the pen again.
