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 is the first thing you check on a book (after the cover art)? I would bet, whether you’re at the library, at a bookstore, or shopping online, it’s the book description. What does that mean for you as a writer? You need to know how to write a book description, preferably a great one.
Nothing sells a book like a well-written description.
Interesting things come in threes. There are three little pigs, not four. Three kittens lost their mittens, Goldilocks and the three bears, three musketeers. You might even say “three is a magic number.”
If you’re a writer, especially a children’s book author, you should be using the rule of three in your writing. In this post, we’ll talk about how.
Today I want to talk about fear. Fear of writing, fear of sharing your work, fear of publishing—and how you can overcome it.
Writers face fear on a day-to-day basis.
The self-doubt. The fear of failure. And, oh, the vulnerability.
Writing is hard enough with all the self-evaluation and doubt about your abilities. But then sharing your work with other people so they can critique or review it? CRINGE.
When you sink into that fear it debilitates you. If you let fear hold you back, you’re ensuring you never achieve your goals. You’ll never write that book and you’ll never get published. All because you were too scared.
The Hero’s Journey is easily the most-used and most-loved storytelling structure in the history of humanity. It resonates with readers in ways that are as old as human D.N.A. itself.
If you want to connect with readers and engage them on a deep level, you would be at an advantage to study this storytelling method and use as much of it as possible in your writing.
One of the best ways to study and master the Hero’s Journey is by seeing it at work in another story. And in recent history, there is no clearer use of the Hero’s Journey than George Lucas’s space opera, Star Wars.
Let’s break it down, step by step.
What do JK Rowling, Christopher Paolini, David Eddings, and Terry Goodkind have in common? They all wrote bestselling novels starring orphans. And this isn’t unique to fantasy. Orphans in literature is a big theme!
Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain all used orphans as some of their most memorable characters.
And don’t forget Superman.
In this post, we’re looking at more than fifty fictional orphans, why authors love writing about them, and whether or not you should include them in your story.
“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?
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.
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.
I had a conversation with a fellow writer recently about contractions, when they’re appropriate to use and when they should be avoided.
But first, what are contractions? Is there a contractions list?
