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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“In fiction, we can help our readers understand our characters’ motivations with clarity… people read fiction—to come to some understanding of why other people act the way they do.”
The question is, do you understand why your characters do the things they do? And are you conveying that understanding to the reader in an interesting way?
Euphemistic language is everywhere in polite society, used to speak and write sensitively about taboo subjects or to tackle difficult situations.
Parents sometimes refer to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex when speaking to their kids.
Euphemisms can make it both easier and harder to talk about uncomfortable topics, so they can be used in interesting ways in literature.
Perhaps you’ve heard the old publishing proverb: The first page sells the book; the last page sells the next book. I’m convinced there’s a mammoth grain of truth in that. The beginning and the end of any story are critical elements that you really want to nail.
Today, we’re going to focus on how to start a story—in other words, how you can craft a spectacular beginning that will hold readers spellbound and get them to turn that first all-important page.
Young adult novels have never been more popular. It started with the rise of Harry Potter and continued with hits like The Fault in Our Stars, The Hunger Games, and Divergent. Have you ever wondered how to write a YA novel?
Learning how to write fiction is one thing, but writing for teens is a whole different ball game. As a teen and an avid YA reader myself, I have a few tips for you.
Some of the books that make the biggest impact on us as readers are the books we read as children and teens. If you want to write for teens, today we have some young adult YA writing prompts to get your creative juices flowing. Use one of these story ideas to write your own YA story!
I’m going to be honest. When I first started writing, I thought keeping track of my writing progress was ridiculous. How many words I wrote in a day or how frequently I wrote depended on my mood and whether that elusive muse showed up. Besides, wasting time tracking and analyzing how much I’d written during a week seemed like just another way to procrastinate and not get any writing done at all.
I don’t say this often, so listen up:
I was wrong.
Writers need to track their writing progress, period. It’s that simple. Read on for why and how to get tracking today.
Whew. Yesterday, I launched my novel, Surviving Death. The launch went well, and it couldn’t have done so without my book launch team. They were awesome helping me spread the word about my book!
How do you build a book launch team? I’m going to share some strategies that I did with this launch and offer some ideas for other things you could do.
The profession of writing has been around for thousands of years. You would think we would have figured out how to become one by now, right? However, the more you read, the more you realize no one seems to agree on how to become a writer.
Depending on who you listen to, becoming a writer is either the easiest thing in the world (“Just write!”) or a proposition so impossibly difficult that only a combination of talent approaching genius, luck, and years of expensive training (i.e. “Get an MFA!”) can turn your writerly dream into reality.
Give these summer-themed writing prompts a try and see if you don’t find yourself enjoying these warm summer days even more!
Which prompt brings back summer memories for you?
If you’ve looked into the process of publishing a book, you might have heard the term “beta readers.” But what are beta readers? Do you really need them? And when do they come into the writing process?
A couple hints: yes, if you’re going to publish a book, you need beta readers. And no, they’re not a replacement for hiring a professional editor.
Even if beta readers aren’t technically a part of the editing process, since they’re not editors, they are essential to impacting positive revisions.
Beta readers can—and will—do wonders for your book. If you know where to find good ones, and how they can positively contribute to your stories.
This is how I found knockout beta readers. Ones that made a big difference in making my story it’s best draft.
