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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A lot of writers and writing blogs on the internet are revving up their engines for NaNoWriMo, which starts on Saturday. I’m not one of those masses, mostly because my love is the editing process moreso than the actual story creation and writing process. As much as I champion the benefits of an editorial eye, I believe that the editorial process should be scrapped during NaNoWriMo in favor of making December NaNoEdMo (even though NaNoEdMo is actually in March).
There’s no doubt that NaNoWriMo rocks. Just thirty days of work in trade for a complete first draft? Awesome.
But that doesn’t mean NaNoWriMo is for everyone. To succeed requires the perfect storm of story, determination, temperament, and an open schedule. Cranking out 1,666 words a day (yes, I did the math) is not for everyone.
Yesterday, a young writer I’m mentoring told me she’s never hated writing so much. She’s in the middle of writing a book and her once-fun “hobby” has become her nemesis. At each keystroke, writer’s block is threatening to stop her from writing her book for good.
“If character is the foreground of fiction, setting is the background,” the narrator of Writing Fiction tells us. But how do you create engaging settings that enhance your story? And how can the popular writing software, Scrivener, help you create setting sketches perfect for particular your story?
I recently read an article in the Guardian that was so wild, so novelesque, that I thought it would make the perfect writing prompt. Here’s the gist: When a first-time author is “cyberbullied” on Goodreads by a book reviewer with a reputation for hurting authors’ reputations, she becomes obsessed with finding out the reviewers true identity.
Do you ever feel like your own worst enemy when it comes to writing? Are there times when you are bursting with inspiration, bursting with ideas to write about, but struggle to get started or bring them fully to form?
When this happens, your creativity is not in the drivers seat. Instead, the inner critic is. Luckily, you can overcome your inner critic by transforming them into an inner cheerleader.
Red herrings are staples of the mystery and suspense genres, but they also can pop up in myriad other works and genres. But what is a red herring? Find out…
Images inspire me. They get me from Point A to Point B. They allow me to see the story before the story every touches paper. And image can be the perfect impetus for a deadlocked storyline.
Today I want you to be inspired. Let’s use imagery to push our writing further. Let’s dig deep and find the meaning behind the image.
I read Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl way back in January after hearing that A. it was amazing, and B. it would be getting a theatrical release in October 2014. I loved the book, and as soon as I started seeing trailers for the movie, I got it into my head that I MUST SEE THIS FILM. The moody teaser, the dark score accompanying the scenes of a marriage unraveling, the mystery of whose story is the truth: the whole thing dragged me in. I saw the movie on Sunday, and it definitely did not disappoint, at least as far as I’m concerned. There’s a lot of debate around the plot, which I won’t go into here because pretty much anything I say would be a huge spoiler.
This weekend I saw the movie Gone Girl and there was this cat. The cat was everywhere, witness to all the dysfunctional behavior happening in the house—and he obviously didn’t care.
I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to write a story from the perspective of a cat?
