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.
And make sure to subscribe to get a weekly digest of our latest posts, along with our free guide, 10 Steps to Become a Writer.
Most great stories, whether they are a Pixar film or a novel by your favorite author, follow a certain dramatic structure.
When you’re getting started with writing, understanding how the structure works is difficult. Even if you go back and analyze your favorite books and films, it can still be hard to structure your own stories. That’s where Freytag’s Pyramid can help.
Adventure stories are built around the life versus death value, meaning that the main conflict and most of the scenes turn on survival. The adventure genre can be set in real life or include an exciting adventure in a fantasy world or other far-flung places most readers will never visit.
Today let’s look at more than 20 adventure story idea prompts to get your own story on its way!
In this story type, the hero and their comrades are attempting to thwart death in the face of an overwhelming physical obstacle, usually in the form of a figure of nature.
This isn’t to say that an adventure story can’t have a villain. However, the primary threats will always come in physical form, forcing the characters to dig deep and find the strength and resolve to endure.
Writing a book is hard. I’ve written seven books and at some point during each one I had the thought, “There has to be a tool, a piece of book writing software, that would make this easier.”
Bad news/good news: writing a book will always be hard, and the best piece of writing software in the world won’t write your book for you. But the good news is there is book writing software that can make the process a little easier.
In this post, we will cover the ten best pieces of software for writing a book and look at the pros and cons of each.
Have you ever wondered which draft you are working on? Do you wonder what the difference is between your first draft, your second draft, and editing your book? You can learn the first draft definition and the differences between drafts in this article.
When writing multiple drafts of a book, you may be halfway through your rough draft and decide to start over. Or you may have written the entire manuscript, but then wish to scrap it and start fresh.
And when considering this, you question: “Am I writing a first draft? Am I editing my novel?”
What does “first draft” mean—or “second draft,” for that matter?
Knowing the differences between first drafts, second drafts, and editing your book will elevate your ability to tackle the writing and editing process. It will help you understand what to focus on when you’re writing—and have fun while you do it!
Have you ever wonder how to market a book? You spend months, maybe even years writing, editing, then rewriting your book until it’s a masterpiece (or at least finished). Now what? How do you turn all that hard work into sales and, if it’s not too much to ask, money!
There are hundreds of things to discuss when it comes to how to market a book, but what are the first steps you need to take, if you’re starting from scratch? That’s what were going to talk about in this article. Ready to get started?
Here’s the underlying principle: your characters are people. People are complicated; I suspect you might know a few. Characters are much the same way. Your reader will relate to them if they behave like people, and for characters to behave like people, they need to be built like people.
You need to know your characters like you do other humans, and these six prompts will help you pull that off.
I’m always looking for new opportunities to improve my writing. As an author and businessman, learning and improving the tools that keep me in business are a high priority on my daily list of to-dos. After all, if you’re not growing, you’re stagnating. And no one can afford to be stagnant in the business of writing.
MasterClass offers a cool opportunity to take online courses from masters in their fields. Is it worth it? Specifically, is Aaron Sorkin’s screenwriting class worth it? And will it help you?
What does it take to write a memoir? Not just any memoir—a great memoir, one that people love and talk about and share with their friends?
In this guide, I want to talk about how you can start writing your memoir, how you can actually finish it, and how you can make sure it’s good.
If you read this article from start to finish, it will save you hundreds of hours and result in a much better finished memoir.
We often think that to create conflict we need to show spectacular events. For example, a car chase, an argument between lovers, a fistfight, or the threat of a nuclear explosion. Or we think of conflict as some kind of internal suffering: depression, longing, or pain.
But the truth is that if events and emotions were the only elements of conflict in our stories, we’d have some pretty flat stories.
Conflict, in good stories, is not about spectacular events or painful emotions. Good conflict is about values.
