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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Which is the better vantage point for the writer: being an outsider or insider? Do the prophets in the wilderness or the embedded reporters make better writers?
This is an important question for us writers because it’s pertains not only to how you write but to how you should live. Should you seek happiness, the society of others, and success? Or should you seek isolation and individual expression?
If you’ve finally managed to carve out a chunk of time to sit down at your computer and write, you don’t want your writing time to be full of interruptions and writer’s block. When I sit down to write, I expect to just write. Here are three ways to be prepared so you’re not getting up every few minutes for something.
Let’s talk about the weather. Most of us no doubt take it for granted… until it’s in our face. The weather determines what we wear and how we drive, influences our experience of sporting events, field trips and beach picnics, and impacts an extraordinary number of aspects of life from crops to airline flights.
So what does weather have to do with writing? Nothing. And everything.
As a culture, we love heroes. We love to have someone to cheer for, someone who embodies what is good and right. Sometimes, however, heroes are stupid. This seems to happen a lot in movies by the Coen brothers (although whether their protagonists are in any way heroic is another matter). This also happens a lot in tragedies, especially in classic tragedies. Every tragic hero has one shining moment of stupidity in all of their stupidity, and that moment is called their hamartia.
Crafting your novel in advance will free your imagination and enable you to produce a more satisfying read. Here’s why.
We all face a point in our writing careers when we feel the heavy weight of writer’s block crushing our muse. We all have moments where we want to write but can’t because nothing comes to mind. Well, nothing that we consider worthwhile that is.
How do you write something that makes your readers cry? Something that sends chills down people’s backs? Prose that explodes in your readers’ imaginations?
How do you write books that sing?
The fact is you don’t write books that sing. It’s impossible. Instead, you edit them until they sing whether they want to or not.
I love reading stories with strong characters. There’s nothing better than a vivid hero or crusty villain who jumps off the page, grabs you by the scruff of the neck, and pulls you into their story.
What happens when we write about a character who does the opposite? Instead of jumping, they sink. Glug, glug, glug…
We all can recall a favorite book we had as kids or one our own kids want to hear over and over. And over. Thousands of children’s books are published each year. These stories, which set the stage for a lifetime of reading, are often very simple. But publishers say that doesn’t mean they’re easy to write.
I’ve recently read the short story collection – Diaboliad by Mikhail Bulgakov. As with all of his writing, these stories revolve around the fantastical, written in the recognizable Bulgakov style. There’s one common thread in them, though – he’s always referring to a Russian writer, mainly a predecessor.
In the introduction, the English editor explains that it’s the Russian writer’s tradition to pay homage to your predecessors, those that shaped the national literature and your early development.