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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How do you create memorable characters? What’s characterization, and how does a writer turn a name on a page into a person so vivid and compelling that you imagine they’re real?
In this article, you’ll learn what characterization is, when it matters, and how to apply it to your characters and stories. You’ll also see some examples of characterization, and explanations of when not to prioritize characterization over other story elements.
First drafts are ugly, as they’re intended to be. Frankly, if your first draft isn’t full of run-on sentences, plot holes, and poorly developed characters, you might be doing something wrong. With the hardest part done, you turn to your second draft—but how do you write a second draft?
To start, you need to write a plot treatment.
The second draft is where your story really comes together. This is where you figure out everything that didn’t work in the first draft and fix it—or treat it. I like the word treat because it looks at the first draft as a patient—it’s not bad, it’s just unwell and needs you to play story doctor and make it better.
Thankfully, the process to improve your story and build a solid foundation for your second draft doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be done easily with a plot treatment.
In this article, you’ll learn what a plot treatment is, and why writing a plot treatment can help guide your second draft.
Anyone can write for fifteen minutes a day. But imagine how fifteen minutes of creative writing each day could change your life. I
Fifteen minutes a day, and I can turn you from an aspiring writer to a daily writer.
How does it work?
So you’ve finished your book. Have you been looking at publishing classes to figure out how to bring your story into the world? I did years ago.
It was 2013.
MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was turning fifty, I had just switched from a very toxic day job to a much more peaceful one, and I had become determined to take my writing career a little more seriously. I researched publishing classes on how to publish, and landed upon the Foundations of Publishing program (then called Write to Publish).
It’s worth mentioning that I went into this program with the utmost confidence.
I had self-published a book the year before, and although it only sold a meager eleven copies, I was convinced that the only issue with it was that I didn’t know how to market, and that if I had just learned the “trick” to attracting an agent or publisher, I would surely become an instant success.
And so I signed up, prepared myself, and thought for certain that I was only weeks away from becoming a best-selling writer.
Are you writing a memoir or novel? Are memoirs nonfiction? Or is there a difference?
If you want your readers to not just pick up your book, but keep turning the pages, you need to learn how to write a hook that will draw them through the story so they never want to put it down. Try baiting your hooks with the thrill of danger to keep your readers on the line.
Yes, we’d all like more traffic, more comments, more readers on our blogs. But if you’re writing a blog, there’s one thing you want even more than readers. You might not admit that you want this. You might not even realize it! But it’s that emptiness you feel every time you’re disappointed after checking your blog stats. What is it?
When I first started blogging, I set up a free account with Blogger. It was great. I didn’t have to understand any crazy computer code. I just had to worry about writing. Then, I read somewhere that I should install Google Analytics to see how many people were reading my blog. It took me an hour, but I figured out how to insert the hieroglyphic-looking code into my theme and opened up my analytics page.
I found out there were about seven people reading my blog. That’s it? I thought. That started me on a quest to figure out how to get more people to read my blog.
You can’t write a great story if you don’t master plot and structure. But what is the best structure for a novel? How do you plot a novel?
Figuring out your plot and structure is essential for your story’s success. Even if you have an exciting idea for a story, great characters, and a memorable setting, you need to put your protagonist through events that have high and escalating stakes.
Without a sound plot and structure, you won’t thrill your readers. Today, we’ll look at story structure and learn how you can build an effective plan for a story packed with suspense, with all the right twists in all the right places.
Many writers struggle with time management, but I’ve taken this dilemma to a whole, new level. In this post I want to talk about how I’ve learned to accomplish twice the writing in half the time.
Some writers have a set schedule. They work the same time every day.
Lucky them.
Others, do not. They sneak in their pages through tiny chunks of time — five minutes here, another 15 minutes there.
Nothing wrong with that, either. Just try to be consistent.
Here’s an interesting fact I’ve recently discovered about myself. In talking to others, they’ve admitted they do this, too…
