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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Have you ever tried launching a book? Does the idea alone intimidate you, or make you feel completely lost?
When launching a book, there’s a lot to learn. Not surprisingly, the best advice comes from writers who have experience in this.
This post is a special segment from author J.D. Edwin. In it, she shares her personal experience about launching her book Headspace, filled with all the essential details you should keep in mind while launching your book.
You sit down, ready to write, and you’re excited because this scene is going to be full of terrific action-packed conflict to grab your reader. But then you wonder, do you even know how to write action scenes?
Are plot points and blow-by-blow action really what keeps readers turning pages? Do you know how to write the kind of action that will add suspense to the story, rev your readers’ heart rate, and leave them dying to know what happens next?
Creating an action scene that works on screen is difficult. Creating an action scene that works on the page might be an even steeper challenge!
Luckily, there are writing strategies to help you write an action scene with skill.
How do you overcome creative resistance? How do you handle that big, blank screen staring at you from your computer? The cursor just blink-blink-blinking its mockery.
When it comes to your writing time, do you avoid it? Choose to read celebrity gossip online, or maybe wander over to your empty refrigerator multiple times? Have you ever written one paragraph but think it sucks, so you delete it? And instead of writing more, stew in self-loathing.
Whatever your creative challenges are on and off the page, you’re not lame or a loser. There’s actually a scientific reason behind your creative resistance.
The even better news is you can change your writing progress so it is progress.
Let’s talk.
Have you ever heard what people tell kids who want to play sports? Practice. Did you grow up with music lessons? You’ve probably heard the same thing. Keep practicing.Â
But can you apply the same philosophy to writing?Â
Not only is practicing writing a good way to improve your writing skills—it’s essential to becoming a better writer.
And like all honed skills, you need a good teacher or guide to push you—to help you practice. In this post, you’ll not only learn four steps to help you practice, but exercises to improve your writing skills along the way.
You might think you don’t need to do much research because you’re writing fiction. (Isn’t fiction just making stuff up?!) You’d be wrong.
Your readers expect to be transported to your setting and to understand your characters so fully, they seem like real people. Little things like using the wrong jargon or having your main character wear the wrong type of bodice can jar your reader out of the story and cause them to lose respect for you as a writer. If they can’t trust you to get the facts right, why should they trust you to guide them through a story?
Like it or not, research is a writer’s best friend. (Next to caffeine, anyway.) So let’s talk about how to conduct research for a book.
As a writer of fiction, you want readers to open your book and become so absorbed they can’t put it down. It helps to be aware that so much of what happens when a reader picks up a book takes place in the subconscious mind. Readers don’t realize that it’s happening,...
Here’s a question for you: what’s the plural of fish?
English is a pretty convoluted language. Even when things seem straightforward, exceptions pop up to turn regular rules upside down.
Today we’ll look closely at the word fish and verify the correct plural use of it.
Whether or not you’re writing a rhyming children’s book like One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish or a literary novel staged on the sea, understanding the proper use of this word—like all good grammar—can strengthen you’re writing.
Learn good grammar without depending on tools like Grammarly with bite-sized posts on simple grammar rules like this one.
Do you love a good cliffhanger? Most readers do. Whether they entail a twist that hits us like a tidal wave or employ a more subtle revelation, cliffhangers keep readers eagerly turning the pages—even if we’re not all entirely sure of a cliffhanger’s meaning.
But what is the definition of cliffhanger? And how can we, as writers, master the use of cliffhangers to write a book that holds readers all the way to the very end?
In this article, we’ll dig deep into what a real cliffhanger is, what it does, and how you can create consistently potent cliffhangers in your own writing.
In July 2011, I accomplished what was at the time the third best thing I’d ever done in my life (after marrying my wife and writing my first book): I started a blog to share what I was learning about the writing craft.
It was called The Write Practice. My goal was to create a place where people could become better writers, finish their books, get published, and accomplish their writing goals.
Since then, over twenty-nine million people have visited The Write Practice. It has grown from just me working out of a coffee shop to a team of over twenty employees, contractors, and contributors.
Together we’ve helped over 7,000 people write books, get published, and accomplish their writing goals.
And we’re just getting started.
What should be included in your first draft? Writing the first draft of a book is incredibly difficult. So much so that many writers don’t even finish their first draft. Why is this? And how can we prevent this from stopping us from writing our first drafts?
Every writer who has ever written a book wrote a first draft for that story—and it’s highly unlikely that the first draft was also the final draft.
Of course, it’s hard to remember this when you’re reading a published book. Writers don’t often see the first, or even second (maybe more!) drafts of a book. Just the final product.
However, behind every great story there is a beginning—and in every beginning there are elements we, as writers, need to care about accomplishing. There are also elements that will only hold us back.
In this post, I will cover the three elements you need to include in your first draft, and the three elements that will only slow down or stop your writing process.
