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.
Here to learn? You’re in the WRITE place!
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.
Check out the latest articles below or find ones that match your interest in the sidebar.
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A Year of Reading the World
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.
Focus Your Story with a Central Image
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.
Cartel [writing prompt]
PRACTICE
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.
What The Hobbit Taught Me About Writing
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.
Discover 10 Up-And-Coming Writers
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.
How to Completely Captivate Your Readers
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?
How to Write a Song
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.
7 Things to Do When NaNoWriMo Is Over
For those of you who have held strong this November, you’re almost there! Only two days left in November. Regardless of whether or not you’ve won, the fact that you have made writing a priority this month is a huge accomplishment.
Now that November and NaNoWriMo is almost over, here are seven things you can do after NaNoWriMo.
The (Un)usual Suspects: Unreliable Narrators in Film and Literature
One of my all-time favorite movies is The Usual Suspects. I could watch it on a loop, and I’d still never get sick of it. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil the ending, and if you keep reading and get mad at me, it’s your own fault because that movie has been around since 1995 and you really should have seen it by now.
The vast majority of the movie is Kevin Spacey’s con man character telling a cop about a job that results in a huge explosion and lots of deaths. He says the mastermind behind the job is a man named Keyser Soze. At the end of the movie, we learn that Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze, and a good number of details from the story that he told the police were made up from things he observed in the cop’s office.
The first thing your brain does after it picks itself up off the floor is get confused: Wait—if he made up those details, what other bits of information did he make up? Was anything he just told us real? Is Keyser Soze even real?
And just like that, the movie that was so straightforward for the first 100 minutes is suddenly a completely different movie.
