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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Characters show us who they are when they are under stress. One way to create stress for a character and deepen their characterization is to inflict a minor injury. How will they respond? Will their reaction affirm who they present themselves to be? Or will it reveal perhaps another dimension of their personality?
Writing a book with a cowriter can be an awesome experience. But cowriting a book can also spiral into a frustrating mess and an abandoned project if you’re not prepared. How do you know whether you should cowrite a book? And then how do you cowrite a book?
A high school pottery teacher split his class in half. To one half he told them they only had to produce one perfect pot by the end of the semester and they would get an A. He turned to the other class. They had to produced fifty pounds of pots by the end of the semester. It didn’t matter whether the pots they made were good or not. They had to be pots and there had to be fifty pounds of them.
By the end of the year, who do you think produced the best pot?
It’s really a question of what makes better work, quality or quantity?
Have you ever written a story you believed in, but couldn’t get it published? Or maybe you’ve had a dream, but after months or even years of pursuing it, you feel no closer to achieving it. That’s not a fun space to be in, but the good news is, you’re not alone.
How do you find more inspiration right now? How do you discipline yourself to write even when you're busy? What do you do about writer's block? 14 Prompts solves problems that plague every writer. Readers have said again and again that it's a perfect blend between...
What are you passionate about? What drives your writing? And just as important—do you write stories that other people like?
Sometimes the best stories come to us when we are challenged to leave our comfort zone and write something we wouldn’t usually try. In that spirit, to give our writing a boost, let’s make a game out of using a writing prompt.
Do you argue with strangers on the internet? (I plead the fifth). Even if you have enough self-control not to engage most arguments and comment sections, chances are high that you think through how you would argue with them if you weren’t fairly certain they are a troll in an alternate universe. Also if your mother wasn’t your friend on Facebook.
Are you leveraging those thoughts? Or just rehearsing them, allowing yourself to feel irritated and angry? Put that energy to good use for your writing. Your next character is hiding in the comments section of nearly any forum. Here’s how to find him or her.
Your writing is an art—but if you want to sell books and make a living from your stories, it’s also a business. How do you balance nurturing your creativity with the demands of the market? And how do you do that while also telling stories that connect with readers in powerful ways?
If your aim is to write engaging fiction—stories that people will read and clamor for, even shell out their hard-earned cash to acquire—there is something very important you need to understand. You are an entertainer. And that means you need to know how to write a hook that will capture your reader and keep her turning the pages.
