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.
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Hey writers. Well, it’s been a weird, hard, interesting year, right? The good news is 2020 is almost over (thank goodness), and as we start looking ahead to 2021, I want to hear from you. What are you struggling with as far as your writing goes? How can The Write Practice help you?
In college, I majored in communication, and the first thing I learned is that communication is a two-way street—it needs a sender and a receiver. As writers, we are senders, and our readers are receivers. But what are we communicating?
Stories, at their core, are a medium for communicating many things, but chief among them is emotion. That means one of the best ways to hook your reader is through emotion.
In this post, you will learn how to hook your reader with emotion, how people experience emotion through reading and three tips to cultivate that emotion through your writing. Then, we’ll end with a creative writing exercise you can use to apply these lessons right away.
Every writer has a dream. It’s what compels you to write in the early hours of the morning, after everyone has gone to bed, in the spare minutes you steal away during the day. It’s what motivates you when you’re stuck in the middle of a story, wondering whether the grueling work of writing is truly worth it.
Is writing worth it? Yes.
Are your stories worth telling? Absolutely, yes.
And if you pursue your dreams and dare to write, can your writing change the world? Definitely.
Writing a novel in a month is a wonderful idea. But it’s hard for a multitude of reasons, and the temptation to give up and just “do it over time” can be really appealing, especially as we approach Day 8 of the journey.
I know it’s hard. But quitting, or choosing to simply abstain, is the worst thing you can do right now if you have a passion for writing.
We’ve all heard of passive vs. active sentences. Active sentences such as “three men stood by the gate” are more attractive and interesting than passive sentences such as “there were three men standing by the gate.”
But the concept of active vs. passive can also be applied to scenes within a story. Appropriate use of active and passive scenes can give your story an extra kick of life and can help with pacing as well.
Now, when I go to bookstores I see them automatically, the little with’s and and’s next to celebrity authors’ names. However, when I first found out a friend had ghostwritten a bestselling book by a major author, I didn’t know what the word “ghostwrite” meant, not to mention the fact that nearly every celebrity author who has ever “written” a book has used a ghostwriter.
Both villains and monsters are considered antagonists, but there are differences between the two. You’ll want to choose which version of antagonist you’re using based on the purpose and tone of your story.
There is a book inside you. There has to be. Why else are you reading a post about writing a book?
Getting that book out, of course, is the extremely difficult part. The words don’t come out as we imagine. The time to write shrinks as life gets busier. And so many questions vex us — so many lies that we tell ourselves to avoid the challenge ahead.
But you have to write your book. It’s one of the greatest driving forces in your life. Here are the lies that might be holding you back, and the truths you need to overcome them.
In life and in writing, romance is a difficult and yet extremely enticing subject. Even in books outside the highly popular romance genre, romantic subplots are immensely popular. But romance is not an easy thing to write, because readers want more than just a straight-up kiss-and-get-married.
A romance on a curved, nuanced road, where your characters have to fight to get to their happily ever after, makes for a much better story. The best way to achieve this is through romantic tension.
Writing is communication. It requires a giver and a receiver. A writer and a reader. While there’s a lot to be said for the value of private writing—diary and journal-keeping, therapeutic ventings on paper, and the like—writing, at its heart, is meant to be shared.
So you write, and then you send it forth.
