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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Year after year, mysteries, thrillers, and suspense stories dominate at the box office, bookstores, and streaming services. We love suspense. We demand it in our entertainment. But what (exactly) is suspense in a story? And why does suspense matter so much in a good...
Why do some books “work,” while others don’t? Why do readers ravenously consume one book, while they put down another and forget about it entirely?
If you want to write books that readers love, you’d be wise to find answers to these questions and apply those answers to your work. Thankfully, there’s a resource available to you that provides an insider’s look at what readers want: The Story Grid!
Some of you may be participating in our 100 Day Book program, writing your first novel on your own, or kicking around the idea of starting that manuscript.
Writing your first novel is hard. It’s a struggle. It’s a learning process.
And it’s often autobiographical, even if you don’t mean it to be. And that’s okay.
Have you ever heard that there are no original stories? As a writer, did this turn your stomach or make you angry?
Although the idea that there are no original stories sounds upsetting, especially for writers, the truth is that every story follows the rule (most likely) of “same, but different.”
That’s a good thing!
If stories were completely original, it would be hard to know if there was a readership interested in them. We want stories that are unique, but that also follow the same conventions and tropes of certain types of stories that we’ve read or seen before.
Doing this means that your story will impact your ideal readers, and here’s why.
Do you crave solid feedback on your writing but rarely get it? Our maybe you’ve received feedback but you’re having trouble what to embrace and reject, or how to apply writing feedback in general.
Learning how to apply writing feedback is tricky, but knowing how and when to accept and reject suggestions can drastically change your story’s ability to touch readers. It will also teach you how to give better feedback to others, which is crucial for building your writing community.
Are you looking for a writing challenge that really tests your writing skills? Something that pushes your writing process beyond national novel writing month (although trying out NaNoWriMo is a good challenge to face)?
As a writer, you’ve probably heard this question: “What’s your genre?” Or maybe you’ve been asked, “What is your book about?”
As writers, we tend to find a creative “happy place” and stay inside three boxes: medium, form, and genre. This allows us to find a consistent voice and target our work towards ideal readers.
But staying inside these boxes without any deviation can have major drawbacks that threaten the quality of your writing, and the joy of writing itself.
In order to stay sharp, writers need challenges to keep their creative juices alive and well.
And whether or not these challenges are daily writing challenges or something you find on social media without even looking for them, it’s important that, as a writing habit, we tackle them head on every once in a while.
We only become better writers when we step out of our comfort zones.
These three writing challenges will test and strengthen your writing skills.
How many articles, blogs, or books have you failed to write? Or have you ever started one of these projects and then hit a hard halt? Are you stumped at why you stopped writing?
Eighty percent of the time writers stop writing is because of three lies they tell themselves.
Knowing what these lies are will help you notice them creeping into your writing process, which is the first step to preventing them from convincing you to quit writing.
When you put your writing out there for others to read, what do you hope will happen? If you’re like most writers, you want readers to get pulled into your story and keep turning pages to the end. You want your story to be un-put-downable.
It’s no secret that the time-tested method of using cliffhangers at the end of your chapters or scenes is a sure-fire way to make that happen. But what a lot of writers don’t realize is that the cliffhanger ending is only half the equation.
The cliffhanger is the hook that makes the reader turn the page, but if you don’t have a solid line supporting them across the gap and a sinker that pulls them deep into the next scene or chapter, your fish is likely to wriggle off and swim away.
Do you like writing fanfiction, but struggle to get going? Do you like to use fanfiction prompts to practice writing? Or, do you question if writing fanfiction will even benefit your writing?
Fanfiction can actually make your writing much stronger. And understanding what fanfiction is and using fanfiction prompts to give it a try (before you bash it) might be well worth your time.
By the end of this post you will be using an excel spreadsheet.
Don’t make that face—I know you’re a writer and not a data analyst. Or if you are a data analyst—I understand that you’re on this blog to get away from you day job. I get it. But guess what? At the suggestion of Randy Ingermason—the creator of the Snowflake Method— I listed all of the scenes in my novel in a nice little Google spreadsheet. It changed my novel-writing life, and doing the same will change yours too.
