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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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First Page of a Book: 4 Page-Turning Tips to Start Your Story

by Monica M. Clark | 124 Comments

I’ve changed the first page of my novel a lot. I can’t even tell you how many times. It happened because as I was writing, I followed a lot of writing blogs, attended a lot of author talks, and browsed a lot of guides that had a lot to say about how to write the first page of a book.

The thinking is that readers thumbing through books in the bookstore and agents alike make snap decisions based on those initial words.

And while it’s essential that the entire book is great, the reality is that the first page of your book sets the tone and expectation for the quality of writing for the rest of the book.

You need to make it good! Something that can uphold the excitement of your book idea and that would impress a publishing company.

Deadlines for Writers: 3 Easy Steps to Try as Your Deadline Looms

by J. D. Edwin | 0 Comments

If you dread deadlines for writers, you’re not alone. And the more you publish, the greater the possibility that you acquire more deadlines than not.

Despite any fear of deadlines, you don’t have to crack under their pressure. Even with all the planning, writing a first draft in six weeks is not easy. Life gets in the way, motivation ebbs and flows, and sometimes you simply can’t force yourself to write.

In this article, you’ll learn three way steps you can take as you near your writing project deadlines, and how to overcome any resistance desperate to hold you back.

Ending of Stories: How Planning an Ending Will Help You Write Faster

by J. D. Edwin | 1 Comment

Readers love the ending of stories, but do you feel like you don’t know how to write a really good ending?

It may seem a little odd to talk about story endings when you haven’t even started writing. Deciding on the type of ending you want, however, is an important part of planning a book.

You usually wouldn’t drive somewhere without a destination in mind. Knowing how your story ends will help you work out the important plot points in between, all the plot twists that eventually lead to that climatic moment.

But how exactly can you write a great ending before the story is even written? Let’s take a look at the essentials an ending must accomplish in order to write a satisfying ending to a great story.

Knowing these common types of endings, and how to decide what endings work best for your story, will bring your character arcs and story full circle.

This post shares writing tips to help you accomplish just that.

Roman A Clef: 3 Liberating Reasons Why Writers Should Use This

by Denise Regga | 12 Comments

Something happened to you. Maybe last year, or maybe twenty-five years ago, but it left its mark. It could be a crazy adventure or journey, or a massive trauma—or just a period of your life that really shaped who you’ve become. And you’d like to write it up as a book. The question is, should you write it as a memoir—or could it work better as a roman à clef?

Your decision will determine whether you stick as closely to real life as you can, or embellish and change things a little (or a lot) and call it fiction.

Writing in roman à clef is a choice many memoir writers make after deciding they need to fictionalize their story—and there’s nothing wrong with that!

In this article, you’ll learn exactly what roman à clef is, some guidelines of how to write a story using it, and why this choice can make a surprising—possibly better—direction for your future book.

How to Write When You Don’t Feel Like It: 5 Practical Tips You Can Try Today

by Joe Bunting | 87 Comments

Are there times in your life when it’s more difficult to write? Do you want to learn how to write when you don’t feel like it?

As a writer, You probably feel frustrated when the muse doesn’t show up, or you feel stuck on a bad idea for a story but desperately want to write one. One day you’re passionate about writing. You’re in the zone.

And then, something happens.

You skip a day. And then two. A week goes by and you haven’t written a paragraph. You enter a black hole of unproductive writing sessions.

You feel guilty, like you should be taking your writing more seriously, but you just can’t muster the willpower to actually write. This is real life for a real writer: there are days when we don’t want to write, where not even an extra large cup of coffee will get you through a writing session.

In this article, we’ll talk about why you don’t feel like writing and what you can do about it.

3 Crucial Steps That Will Improve Bad Writing

by Jeff Goins | 95 Comments

Our parents told us to try our best. Whether at school or Little League, we were encouraged to give it our all, and that was enough to make them proud.

But the truth is there are different kinds of trying, and not all efforts are equal. In order to achieve excellence, we need to practice deliberately.

Plot Treatment: 4 Simple Steps to Plan A Story’s Second Draft

by J. D. Edwin | 1 Comment

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.

Your First Writing Practice

by Joe Bunting | 782 Comments

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?

Publishing Classes: Foundations of Publishing Started My Writing Career

by J. D. Edwin | 0 Comments

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.