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.
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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.
What’s the difference between grammar vs punctuation? Why do they matter, or do they matter at all?
And how can you get better at them, even if all the grammar and punctuation rules are a struggle to remember?
Without the White Witch, Aslan is just a recluse lion. Without Moriarty, Sherlock is just a know-it-all in a weird hat. Without the Joker, Batman is just a rich dude with anger issues and too much time on his hands.
Our villains make our heroes. Without them, our heroes can’t shine. That’s why it’s important to give our villains scenes where they can wow us with their quirks and scare us with their ferocity.
While 2016 was completely crazy, it was also extremely productive for me as I writer. Last year, I was able to finish writing THREE books. THREE. In one year. Sounds kind of crazy in hindsight.
Through writing those three books, I learned a ton. And today I’ve compiled a list of all the reasons you should write a book too.
Often, backstory is simply told to the reader in the opening or a prologue; this slows down the pace and comes across as a massive info dump. In those instances, the reader might decide to put the book down.
And that’s not what you want. But before you throw out backstory altogether, let’s look at one way to reveal well-developed backstory in a more organic way: through the setting.
It’s practically inevitable. You’re rockin’ and rollin’ through your writing, feeling invincible, and then you reach a sudden halt: You’re blocked. The words won’t come. It seems like there’s nothing more, and yet you’ve got things to do! Deadlines to meet! Dreams to fulfill!
It can seem impossible. But never fear: it can be done.
Here’s how to write a book when you’ve got writer’s block.
Both “insure” and “ensure” are verbs. They both derive from the same word meaning “to make sure.” So are they just a spelling variant of the same word?
No. The context can help clarify the difference between insure and ensure and the more distinct meanings for each.
There are real benefits to writing poetry like expanding your language skills and your ability to capture emotion with words: skills that will help you as a writer, no matter what genre you write in.
I love new words. I always get really excited whenever I learn a new word, and I try to use it as often as is applicable in my daily life. Sometimes this is harder to do than I’d like. However, this is a writing blog, and the word I learned today is a writing word. Congratulations, you get to learn about enjambments.