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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What images come to mind when you think of the first day of spring? Tulips unfurling? Easter egg hunts? Baseball season? Spring cleaning?
Whatever spring activities grace your calendar this month, I hope you’ll take some time to keep your writing habits going. In only 15 minutes a day, you can capture your creative writing ideas, practice new skills, or make progress on that book you’ve been dreaming of writing. Here are 40 new spring writing prompts to get you started!
A thriller is not just a rollercoaster ride, but like a whole day at a theme park with head-of-the-line privileges. Ride after wild ride with maybe just enough down time to eat a corndog and take a bathroom break. The necessary ingredients for a thriller include conflict, tension, and suspense, all tied up in a nice, twisty package.
The thriller genre is wildly popular. Thrillers are like mysteries, but with a super dose of suspense, action, and anticipation for the reader. Here are some thriller story ideas to help you start crafting your own fast-paced thriller today!
We’re on a characterization kick this week on The Write Practice. Today, we’re going to continue to delve into the lives of our characters by going through a list of thirty-five questions to ask your characters made famous by the canonical French author, Marcel Proust.
Using the novel Divergent by Veronica Roth as an example, we look at the difference between a symbol vs. motif, and how they affect the story.
Whether you’re writing a novel, a memoir, or even painting a portrait, it’s important to understand who you’re writing about.
Creating a character portrait is a characterization technique used by writers like Cheryl Strayed, Marcel Proust, and others to better understand your characters.
In this post, you’ll learn exactly what character portraits, how to create one of your own, and how to get the most out of them in your writing.
So you want to know how to write a mystery novel. I’m delighted to hear it. I’ve been a mystery lover since I hid behind the Lincoln Logs in Mrs. Jenkins third grade classroom so I could finish my first Nancy Drew, undisturbed. Mystery hooked me that day, and has been leading me around by the nose ever since.
Do you enjoy a good whodunit? So do I! There’s something wonderful about a cozy mystery, especially for writers. Crafting a good mystery is one of the best writing exercises there are. Today, it’s my pleasure to share with you some fun, quirky, story ideas for writing mysteries.
An antihero is a central character in a story who displays unheroic flaws or characteristics associated with villains, but who may garner more empathy and understanding as they can appear more human and relatable than traditional heroes.
Take a look at our list of over 75 antihero examples to see if you want to create one for your story today.
According to Merriam-Webster, a colloquialism is “a colloquial expression.” Wasn’t that helpful?
When we look up “colloquial,” we learn that it means, “used in or characteristic of familiar and informal conversation.”
So, a colloquialism is an expression used in or characteristic of casual speech. It can also be a local or regional dialect expression. This is critically important to understand as you write dialogue for characters.
