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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While many novels and stories are set in a vacation location, you can take your character on vacation just to see what they are made of. Vacation can be frightfully stressful and reveals much about us as people. It can do the same for your character. Try it out with this writing prompt.
Do you ever want to give up on writing? The impulse to quit can strike at any moment. In the beginning, when you’re trying to start writing but can’t. In the middle, when a story just won’t do what you tell it to. Or even at the end, when you’ve written something amazing but can’t find anyone to share it with.
Writing isn’t just artistically difficult. It’s spiritually challenging.
But you have to overcome the temptation to quit. You have to believe that each failure will pass and lead to success.
And most importantly, you have to believe that you write stories not because of some accident or mistake in the cosmic order of things. You write because you were meant to write.
You are fulfilling a calling.
If you’ve made it your mission to write, it’s probably because you love reading. Your life has been touched and changed by books you’ve read and stories you’ve heard since you were a tot, and now you want to create that experience for others. The irony is that once you start writing, it’s often difficult to find time for reading, and that’s just wrong on so many levels.
It’s difficult to know how much to plan when starting a new story. Is it essential to have each and every character, scene, and key change in mind beforehand? How much, or how little, do you need? (Hint: it’s less than you might think!)
The bad news is, no matter how much you plan, your first draft is destined to be messy. But even if you’re a pantser, there are a few key questions you should answer before you start. When you do, you’ll be building your story on a rock-solid foundation that will give you the freedom to take risks that won’t cost you a ton of time and energy in the long run.
An experienced author responds to aspiring children’s book writers’ questions about writer’s block and how to find the confidence to start their own story.
You have created a character. You’ve named them and given them a colorful past, as well as lots of fun personality traits. Your character steps into your story . . . and suddenly you find that they’ve fallen flat. How can you fix them?
They’re boring. Those personality traits you meticulously picked out for them just aren’t showing up. Your character goes through the motions of the story and you wonder why this interesting, unique character you’ve worked so hard on is missing that luster you imagined.
Not to worry: there’s a simple, two-step fix to give your characters voice and personality.
What do you do when you just don’t want to write? You know what I mean. You know you should be writing. You tell yourself you should finally finish that short story. You feel you should turn off the television, close up Facebook, and stop checking your email so you can write.
You should should should…
But you can’t. And worse, you don’t know why.
Congrats, you wrote a book and launched it! It’s on to the next book. But maybe you’re feeling tired. As for writing a whole book, you need a break. Maybe you’re thinking, “I wrote a book. Now what?”
But can you take a break and still practice writing, if you’re not writing?
Yes, you can! By taking a different, brief and temporary, writing approach.
In this post, I’ll share how focusing on 3 R’s—Reviews, Reading Panels and Residencies—can help you develop your writing platform in new and unexpected ways.
As an author, Amazon is where you need to be if you want to make a success out of your career, whether you’re publishing in Kindle Unlimited or publishing “wide” (to multiple retailers). But the competition these days is off the charts. You’ll need to write a great story, have an amazing cover and a good keyword research tool to help you set your book apart—whether it’s for Kindle keywords, competition analysis, or Amazon ads.
Luckily, there are a few tools out there that help you reverse-engineer the marketing of successful books. These tools are great for idea generation, market research and putting your book in the best position to sell well.
Two popular options are Publisher Rocket and KD Spy. In this article, we’ll compare them side-by-side and find out which is the best option for you.
One of the greatest challenges of writing better stories is knowing exactly which scenes to write. The best scenes focus on the core elements of conflict — which means before you can write amazing scenes, you have to find the conflict in a story.
Strong scenes come from strong plans. And visualizing the conflict between your characters is a great way to do just that.
