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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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.
Euphemistic language is everywhere in polite society, used to speak and write sensitively about taboo subjects or to tackle difficult situations.
Parents sometimes refer to “the birds and the bees” as a euphemism for sex when speaking to their kids.
Euphemisms can make it both easier and harder to talk about uncomfortable topics, so they can be used in interesting ways in literature.
Many fantasy writers love world building—sketching out maps, cataloguing pantheons, and crafting magic systems. But when it’s time to write a story set in that world, they often struggle to translate their fantasy worldbuilding lore into narrative. This is understandable. After all, how do you fit an entire world into a book—and tell a compelling story at the same time? The answer, paradoxically, is to start small.
You want to write a book. Maybe you have a great story idea. Maybe you have a big idea you want to share with the world. Maybe people have told you, “Your life should be made into a book!” But first, you have to learn how to write a book.
The problem for the first-time author is figuring out how to get started. What are the writing habits you need to finish the actual writing for an entire book? And what comes next: traditional publishing? Self-publishing? Becoming a New York Times bestselling book?
Because after coaching thousands of writers to write and finish their books, and also writing fifteen books of my own, I know exactly how much hard work it takes to finish a book.
It’s not enough to want to write, you need to know how to write a book.
You need to have the right process. The write process, you might say (sorry, I had to!).
In this guide, we’re going to learn everything about how to write a nonfiction book, from how to defeat procrastination and find writing time, all the way to revising and the editing process—and even to the publishing process.
If you’ve ever wanted to write a book, whether a memoir, a big idea book, or a self help book, you’re in the right place.
If, on the other hand, you’re a fiction writer and have a main character who you know is going to take the world by storm, we have a complete guide on novel writing here. For you nonfiction writers, though, read on for all our best writing tips.
Here are 30 June writing prompts from journal prompts to story starters to skill building prompts. Try one and keep your writing sharp this summer.
Whether you’re self publishing or you have a traditional publisher, it’s up to you to sell your books. Email marketing is the number one way to sell books. But in order to use email marketing effectively, you first have to gather a list of email addresses, a group of readers who want to hear from you.
Struggling to build your list? Try this.
How do you submit a short story for publication? It’s a lot to think about and I’ve seen more than one writer throw in the towel and say they’re happy to just be writing. To make it easier, there are ten steps you can take to tackle short story submissions.
It may seem overwhelming, but once you know what you’re doing, getting short stories published isn’t as scary as it seems.
In this article, you’ll learn the ten steps needed to submit a short story for submission and hopefully get it published.
Handwritten notes are like sending a hug through the mail. They have personality and character, attributes a computer screen will never have. Let me show you why, when, and how to write a thank-you note.
You have finished writing the first draft of your story, a version of your whole story from beginning to end. Now it is time to edit, to revise your words to make your story clear and compelling, so the reader will continue reading after the first sentence.
Editing your story might feel like an impossible task, but when you have a strategy to use, you can be confident you can edit your own story and improve your writing.
Whatever you do, do not skip the important step of editing your first draft. According to David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, “Revision is all there is.”
Want to become a better writer? Perhaps you want to write novels, or maybe you just want to get better grades in your essay writing assignments, or maybe you’d like to start a popular blog.
If you want to write better, you need practice. But what does a writing practice actually look like? In this post, I’m going to give you everything you need to kick off your writing practice and become a better writer faster.
