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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How do good stories end? In tragedy or triumph? With a wedding or a funeral?
That is the question of the denouement, a literary term that means more than just “the end.”
This article is all about denouement. In it, we will talk about the origin and definition of the literary term, give examples, and talk about where it fits in your writing.
November is here! It’s a perfect time to dust off your writing journal (the one you got for the holidays last year?) and start exploring some creative writing ideas before the end of the year. Today we have 30 November writing prompts to get you started. Let’s go!
Last Wednesday through Sunday, I went to Reykjavik with some friends thanks to Groupon. Fortunately, the jet lag hasn’t hit much since coming home, but it was a great weekend. We saw the Northern Lights, we saw waterfalls, we saw geysers, and we saw a place where two tectonic plates meet.
By the way, that last text pattern, with the repetition of “we saw”, is what’s called anaphora.
If you’ve ever had the middle of a manuscript sag and feel flabby, congrats. You’re a writer! One of the questions I ask when get stuck in the middle of a manuscript is this: “How can I make this worse for this character?” One of the key elements you might use is the very thing we try so hard to avoid on a daily basis: abrasive people.
How can an abrasive character push your character’s arc, keep the plot moving, and deepen the theme? Read on to find out.
How do you tell a great story? Perhaps the best way to judge a story is by how good the climax is.
If your story isn’t good, the climax will be muddled or boring. A good story, though, will bring together all the tension that has been building since the exposition into one perfect scene that overwhelms the audience and leaves them in awe.
What is the climax, though? And how do you write a good one?
I recently finished a novel where a character hiding in a secret panel in an old house had lost consciousness and died. The only person who had an inkling of the hiding space was a child who grew up harboring the terrible secret. Secrets are a great way to add depth to a character, especially if the secret is on theme. Try this writing prompt and see what you uncover!
Short stories are their own art form. In a novel, you have an entire book to elaborate, to make your readers care. In a short story, you have to have the same elements, but in about two percent of the words. How can you shorten story?
Ultimately, learning how to write a story in fewer words takes practice. Luckily, tightening a short story into an even shorter story is something you can get the hang of over time.
This article shares various, easy writing tips that can help you cut your word count—and make your short story all the better for it.
Master storytellers often use allusion to add richness or depth and to let readers make deeper connections to a story. Let’s look at a definition, some allusion examples, and how to use allusion in your own writing.
So you wrote a story or a novel or a book. You’re proud. You’re excited. Visions of publishing dance in your head. Then you go back and read your story or novel or book, and you think, “Well, this is good and I feel proud of it. But it doesn’t match up to the stories/novels/books I know and love.”
You wrote a GOOD story, but not a GREAT one. Worse, you don’t know why. It might be that you’re missing a crisis.
The best way to immerse your readers in your fantasy story is through world-building, which can be an arduous and intimidating process. After all, to create an entire world is no easy task.
But what if you don’t want to spend a lot of time world-building? The key lies in lore. Lore is defined as “a body of traditions and knowledge on a subject or held by a particular group, typically passed from person to person by word of mouth.”
