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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Are you frustrated with your writing? Tired of writing words you know aren’t as good as you want them to be? Frustrated writer, I know why.
A weird thing happens when we finally sit down to write The Book: we expect it to come out as magnificently as we think it should. We see or feel what it should be, and hey—we’ve read and written stuff all our lives, right? It should just come out!
But it doesn’t.
This is normal.
Want to write a memoir but not sure how to get started? I’ve got you covered. In this post, I’m sharing my ten best creative writing prompts for memoir writers.
What does it take to write a memoir? Not just any memoir—a great memoir, one that people love and talk about and share with their friends?
In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good.
If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.
Memoir is about something that happened in the past. You can write the story in the past tense. Or you can write the story in the present tense, as though it is happening now.
There is power in the present tense. Have you considered using it as you write about the past?
ProWritingAid has always been a great tool for catching my spelling and grammar mistakes, but I was curious: could it handle bigger-picture problems like plot holes and character inconsistencies? And if so, how accurate would it be? I tested both features on the first draft of my novel, and here are my honest thoughts.
Plot has a specific structure. It follows a format that sucks readers in; introduces characters and character development at a pace guaranteed to create fans; and compels readers to keep reading in order to satisfy conflict and answer questions.
Do you want readers to love your story? (Who doesn’t, am I right?) Then you need to understand plot.
How do you submit a short story for publication? It’s a lot to think about and I’ve seen more than one writer throw in the towel and say they’re happy to just be writing. To make it easier, there are ten steps you can take to tackle short story submissions.Â
It may seem overwhelming, but once you know what you’re doing, getting short stories published isn’t as scary as it seems.
In this article, you’ll learn the ten steps needed to submit a short story for submission and hopefully get it published.Â
Handwritten notes are like sending a hug through the mail. They have personality and character, attributes a computer screen will never have. Let me show you why, when, and how to write a thank-you note.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably spent more hours than you’d like to admit staring at website templates, trying to figure out what to write in your bio, or what exactly should go on your homepage.
Recently, I discovered Tertulia, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the easiest platform I’ve ever used to set up an author website.
Atmosphere matters. You might be someone who will pay a premium to eat at a restaurant with a certain ambience or buy a house in a setting that supports a particular feeling. But how do you use atmosphere in your book?
In like manner, your reader won’t remember every word you wrote, but if you infuse the story with atmosphere, they will remember the way it made them feel.
But how can you weave atmosphere into your story without making it feel forced? How can your story’s atmosphere evoke an emotional response and leave a lasting impression on your readers? How can you leverage this literary technique to enhance that feeling?
A strong sense of atmosphere figures into the works of William Shakespeare. Edgar Allan Poe mastered atmosphere in poems like The Raven and his haunting tales of suspense. J.K. Rowling managed it well in the Harry Potter series.
And you can learn it too.
There are many literary devices and elements of fiction a writer uses to impact the atmosphere of a literary work, including figurative language, word choice, similes, and personification. In this post, we’ll examine how point of view and genre considerations help to set the mood and establish atmosphere.Â
