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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If you’re lucky enough to be asked to speak at a commencement ceremony, at any level, you know the pressure of writing a memorable speech with broad appeal that fits within the time constraints. But how to write a graduation speech that doesn’t bore, drag, or flop? Here’s a secret: use your storytelling skills to write a great graduation speech.
Sometimes people confuse the latin term per se with per say, especially because they sound identical in everyday speech. Today’s writing tip clears up any confusion.
Are you struggling to write? Read on for my best writing hacks to get you writing now.
There’s no getting around it. Writing is hard. Whether you’re writing your first book, crafting an essay for school, blogging, or just writing for fun, there are so many things against you.
First is the time itself. What you could say in five minutes takes a huge amount of time to write into coherent, grammatically sound sentences.
Then there are the distractions: social media, video games, endless sudoku puzzles (my personal kryptonite).
Finally, and perhaps worst of all, there is writer’s block, which can vary from a general aversion to writing to crippling self-doubt and an inability to put any words on a page, let alone something good.
Yes, writing is hard. So hard it’s amazing people write at all, some for fun no less!
The good news is that if you’re having a hard time writing, you’re not alone. Even great writers struggle with distraction and writer’s block. To be honest, I struggle too. I’ve written 15 books and still struggle on a daily basis to write.
At the same time, writing can be amazing, inspiring, fulfilling, even life changing. If you’re struggling to write, in this article I’m going to share all the writing tips to help you get focused that I know. Hopefully at least one of these tricks will get your creativity thrumming, get the words moving, and help you finally get to writing.
So grab a cup of coffee, open up a blank page, and get ready to write.
Are you frustrated with your writing? Tired of writing words you know aren’t as good as you want them to be? Frustrated writer, I know why.
A weird thing happens when we finally sit down to write The Book: we expect it to come out as magnificently as we think it should. We see or feel what it should be, and hey—we’ve read and written stuff all our lives, right? It should just come out!
But it doesn’t.
This is normal.
The first time I wrote a novel, I didn’t think about genre until the first draft was done, and I began trying to untangle my mess in revision. After two painful years (mostly comprised of avoidance, procrastination, and general despair), I hired a developmental editor who began our first phone call by asking, “What kind of book is this?” and “Who is your ideal reader?”
“It’s for everyone,” I said. I could hear the rise and fall of my breathing in the silence.
“No, it isn’t,” she said in a kind, but firm voice. Within minutes, I realized I had skipped a clarifying question that would guide every step of the book process from the plot and characters to cover design and marketing.
Want to take one of Skillshare’s many creative writing classes but not sure where to start? Or maybe your wondering whether these classes actually work, whether they’ll really help you transform for an aspiring writer into a published author.
In this post, I’m going to review the seven best creative writing classes on Skillshare, sharing the ones I would consider taking if I were in your position, and the pros and cons of each, and most of all, whether they will help you accomplish your writing goals and become
I love The Princess Bride. I saw the movie before I knew there was a book, but once I found out that a literary form of the story existed, I immediately checked it out from my high school library and devoured it. I found another copy at a clothing swap about two years ago, and it’s been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. I’m due for another reading soon, I think.
How do you become a better creative writer? That was the question I was facing in my own life more than ten years ago. I wanted to be a writer, was even writing part-time for a local magazine, but I didn’t know how to make my dreams of becoming a professional writer happen.
Five years later, I had finally made it, and now, five years after that, I’m earning over $100k from my writing.
How did I do it? It took so many things, but one of the first, and most important, was travel.
In fact, I believe every writer should travel. In this post, I’ll explain why. But I don’t want you to just take my word for it. No, I actually want to send you on a trip to Paris, one of my favorite writing destinations, on me.
Last week, I overheard a conversation at a neighboring table where a woman said, “He’s always trying to prove himself. It makes him look less competent than he is.” I didn’t know the parties involved, but I grabbed a napkin and jotted it down. When I added it to my notebook, I realized characters with something to prove often undermine their own success. And those insecurities make for an amazing writing prompt.
As a writer, you know building a foundation for your story, like a hook and sympathetic character, will allow you to grab readers right out of the starting gate. But once you’ve done this, do you know how to raise the stakes?
While a high stakes beginning grabs readers, it will only excite you and your reader for a few scenes. Without elevating stakes, your reader’s excitement about the plot will wear off if nothing bigger happens. Any interest in your story as a whole will flatten.
It’s human nature. We become inured. But you can avoid this happening by making the path of your book less like that flatland racetrack, and more like a jagged mountain range. With ups, downs, and an overall rise to the finish.
In this article, the word of the day is “stakes.”
As your story’s conflict progresses, the risks to your main character must intensify, keeping the reader invested in turning pages to find out what happens. Once you’ve laid the foundation for high suspense and captured your reader’s attention, you need to up the ante. Similar to the stakes of a hand of poker.
Finding ways to do this is not always easy, but when you put forth the effort, the results can be spectacular!
And there are practical strategies and tips you can use to do this.
