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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Last week, hundreds of writers submitted their stories to the Summer Writing Contest. Right now, our panel of judges is reading through each story, looking for the ones that will make it to the winners’ circle. And while they’re hard at work, I have an invitation for you, too.
I’m inviting you to step over to the judges’ side of the submission table. I’m inviting you to try reading like an editor and decide which story you would choose as the winner of the Summer Writing Contest.
Has this happened to you? You finish a story and polish it to a shine, compose your cover letter, send the package off to an editor, and wait through an agonizing time period, only to get that form letter saying thanks, but we’ll pass. Your book was rejected.
It’s happened to me. More times than I care to think about. One thing writers who want to publish learn right off is the pain of rejection, and my best piece of advice is to get used to it. There is life after rejection, and you’ve got to be willing to jump up and go at it again. And again.
Ever read about another author’s success and become frustrated? It doesn’t have to be that way. If we can learn to receive author success stories and testimonies with the right attitude, they can be amazing learning tools that will help us become better writers.
There’s an old, worn-out adage about writing: Write what you know. Which is fine if you’re writing about the day-to-day life of Earth, but what if you want to write about a world you don’t know? Today, we’re talking with science fiction author Mike Van Horn about world building and immersing your readers in that world.
Have you ever written a scene that didn’t feel authentic or sit right with you? One very possible reason for such a scene is that your character did not act in accordance with their nature. As writers, we sometimes hit a fallback position where we have our character do what we would do rather than acting … in character. We have to remember to write from the character’s personality rather than our own.
I am not a proponent of detailed character sketches—believing, instead, that the character reveals herself to the writer as the story unfolds. However, as we get to know the character we’re writing, it’s important to understand the essentials of her personality. By doing so, we make it easier to understand and portray the shifts that make up the character arc.
Back at the end of April, we discussed using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to develop your characters. We covered the more obvious personality traits: Extroversion vs. Introversion and Thinking vs. Feeling. I would feel bad if we didn’t take the plunge into rounding out all of the elements of the Myers Briggs test, so here we’re tackling Intuition vs. Sensing and Judging vs. Perceiving, which are often the harder Myers Briggs character traits to explain.
We can’t wait to get to the climax of a story. It’s the most exciting part, the place with the most action and intense moments. Right?
Have you ever wanted to write a story readers loved—and even win some amazing prizes for it? Join our Summer Writing Contest to write an amazing story, get published, and even become a better writer along the way!
Beginnings matter.
We only get one chance to hook our readers, to pull them in, to guarantee they must read on. That’s probably why so many writers panic over how to start writing those first few pages of a novel.
So how do you start a novel? Where is the best place to begin? Take heart, dear reader: in today’s post, I’ll give you three ways to start a novel, a bonus nugget about antagonists, and a key question to ask yourself before you get to work.
It’s with a bittersweet tone that I write this post, because it will be the last one I write for The Write Practice for a long time as I get ready for my first year of college. I’ll call this a “soft goodbye” since this is technically my last post, but it definitely will not be the last time I “hang around” The Write Practice. I’ve learned so much in the seven years I’ve contributed to this fabulous website and I still have so much to learn. I thought I’d share seven of those writing lessons with you now.
