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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What if you only had only one more day to write? What would you write?
This is the dilemma faced by Harry of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Snows of Kilamanjaro.” We find Harry on his deathbed, plagued by the depression that his life will soon end. Yet, the thought that torments Harry most is that he will never be able to write all of the stories he has put off writing over the years.
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
– There are currently over 181 million blogs.
– Three million books were published in 2011. That’s one book for every 100 or so people in the US.
– The chances of getting your book published traditionally are somewhere between 5% and .1% (1 in 20 to 1 in a thousand).
– If you give up on a traditional publisher and decide to self-publish, the average self-published book sells somewhere between 20 and 100 copies.
For the aspiring writer, those are not great numbers to hear, and in the midst of that, you might wonder, “Does my story really matter?”
It happened again last week. I poured my heart, soul, time, and energy into a scene. It was on my mind for days and I tried to sculpt every world to the point of perfection. Then the scene disappeared.
Is what you’re reading what you write? Not entirely, though admittedly it can be a subconscious influence. Reading foreign authors and other cultures, in different genres and styles, can broaden one’s horizons almost as much as visiting remote places and exploring cultures. The opportunity to find out – to explore – to discover – is only a book away.
A CENTRAL IMAGE: build one into your story and readers will love you.
What would Moonstruck be without its full moon? Or Moby Dick without its white whale? When you think of The Sun Also Rises, you think of Spanish bulls.
Jeff’s got a great post on goinswriter.com today about the difference between cartels and clubs that’s fueling my imagination. For our prompt today, write about a cartel. Think Mexican drug cartels and East Coast mafia families.
Write for fifteen minutes.
When your time is up, post your practice here in the comments section. And if you post, please be sure to comment on a few posts by other writers.
Unless you have been living in a hobbit hole, you probably know J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous novel, The Hobbit, has been adapted for film and is coming out this Christmas season. If you’re a die hard Tolkien fan, you may have already bought your tickets for the midnight show (I haven’t, but I did make plans to see the Friday matinee).
The Hobbit is one of the best selling books of all time, selling over 100 million copies since it was published in 1937. Needless to say, there are a few things every writer, regardless of their genre, can learn from it.
Real writers read. Writers read the classics. Writers read bestsellers in their genre. And writers read the work of their peers.
The problem with today’s market is there are just too many books to be read. How do you know if what you’re reading is going to be any good, especially if it’s a writer I haven’t heard of before?
Personally, I have so much reading to do, I’m rarely interested in reading books by writers I don’t know. Why take the risk?
And this is exactly why we’ve created the Show Off Anthology.
We’ve all read stories that keep us enthralled the whole way through. The plot captivates us, and the characters tug at our hearts.
And then there are the stories that we easily put down after several pages or a couple of chapters. We don’t relate to or care about the characters, and the plot doesn’t hold our interest.
How do you write a story that keeps readers completely invested?
There is both magic and discipline in the art of songwriting. You may be reading this as a professional writer or as someone who dabbles for the joy of it, but one thing remains—we are all creative. I honestly believe this.
As I sit here trying to share some of the tricks I’ve learned over the last decade of songwriting, I know you could quit reading right now and go write a great song because the moment may just strike you—magic. I also know you could sit down and decide to write a song and not quit until the job is done—discipline. I would love to help you achieve both.
