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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Being an indie author comes with its pros and cons. For me, I enjoy having control over the process from start to finish. One of the disadvantages of self-publishing is you do not own your customer list when people buy your book from Amazon or another online retailer.
That means you and your book are at the mercy of the retailer to market to potential readers. The ‘zon is not going to hand over their customer list to you. You have to build your own list, and BookFunnel can help.
Genre matters, and by understanding how genre works, you not only can find more things you want to read, you can also better understand what the writer (or publisher) is trying to do.
In this post, you’ll learn the three best techniques to find weak verbs in your writing and replace them with strong ones. We’ll also look at a list of the strongest verbs for each type of writing, including the strongest verbs to use.
As humans, we turn to others for advice or accepted wisdom when we need help. But you can find examples of adages all around you. But what is an adage?
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.
Halloween is right around the corner and I know a lot of you will be writing some spine-chilling stories to celebrate. What’s the best part of a creepy story? A monster.
When writing monsters, you could rely on the tried-and-true vampires, zombies, and giant, man-killing spiders. There’s nothing wrong with adding to the monster canon, but it does get a little boring after a while. It’s often better to make up your own monster. But how?
Decades have been spent honing the standard wants and abilities of vampires and zombies. How can you make a monster just as good in a much shorter time frame?
If you’re interested in getting your book traditionally published, it’s crucial that you sign with a literary agent who loves your story and has a vision for your career. To do this means you need to write the single most important page you’ll ever write outside of your book: a query letter.
No pressure, right?
If the thought of writing a query letter freaks you out or confuses you, hit the pause button and breathe for a second. You are not alone.
Here’s the good news: there is a method that will help you get an agent to say, “Sounds great! Send me more.” I call this the three-paragraph method. It’s all about the hook-book-cook!
A heinous murder. A jilted lover. An angry hero determined to get justice. Revenge stories are a vital part of the human experience. Let’s take a look at how to write one of your own.
Do you know any wise fools? Have you ever seen a jumbo shrimp? Experienced a deafening silence? Tasted bittersweet chocolate? Found a picture pretty ugly? Declared something awful good?
If so, you’ve experienced or used an oxymoron. What, then is an oxymoron? Let’s take a look.
If you’re new to short story writing, it can be intimidating to think of fitting everything you need in a story into a small word count. Do you need to apply certain elements of a short story in order for it to be great?
Writers like you struggle with this all the time.
You might want to develop deep character backgrounds with a huge cast of characters, amazing settings, and have at least two subplots. And that’s great. But that wouldn’t be writing a short story.
You might try to cut some of these things, and then all the sudden you don’t have a character arc or a climax or an ending.
Every story has basic elements; a short story’s basic elements are just more focused than a novel’s. But all those elements must be there, and yes, they need to fit into a short word count.
In this article, you’ll learn what you need to make sure your short story is a complete story—with three famous short story examples. These story elements are what you should focus on when writing a short piece of fiction.
