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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Writers’ conferences can launch a career. They bring writers face to face with authors, agents, editors, publishers, and other writers at all skill levels.
But they can feel overwhelming for the uninitiated. With all the offerings, how does a writer navigate a conference to get the most from it?
Psychology and writing go hand-in-hand. Both are about understanding how people think and act, and why. But you don’t need a psychology degree to write a good story—just a curiosity about the people around you.
Do you know what your character’s objects of desire are? What do they want, and what do they need? And how do you leverage those wants and needs to create conflict in your story?
Writing a great story is a very challenging task. But there are secrets, shortcuts, and techniques that will give you an advantage as you start writing so that every word is focused on the proper goal of your story.
Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid is an excellent place to turn. And in this third post in my series on writing great stories using Story Grid principles, you’ll learn why conflict is the lynchpin of powerful storytelling and how to use it to thrill your readers.
If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the number of tasks you want to complete in 2019, never fear. I’ve definitely been there before. When everyone is posting on Facebook or their blogs about what they’re going to do come January 1, it can be easy to feel like you aren’t doing enough or that you don’t even know where to start.
Luckily, I have some prompts to help you decide what writing goals you want to focus on next year.
I don’t know about you, but I struggle to write on Mondays. There are always so many details to catch up on, emails to respond to, meetings to attend.
But for me, last week was a pretty terrible week for my writing. I had way too many late nights cranking out words to make my word count goal. I procrastinated way too much. And I’m determined to have a better week this week. So I’m implementing one writing tip in my rhythm this week, and it might help you, too.
It’s that time of year again: the season of a million holiday writing prompts plastering the internet. I’m going to jump on the bandwagon and give you another one. Groan if you like.
December can be a difficult time for creatives. With holiday parties, additional family responsibilities, and decorations to hang, it is hard to keep up the discipline of writing. Sometimes what we need is someone in our ear, giving us advice and spurring us onward, with motivational quotes for writers.
It would be helpful if this inner coach was a model of leadership and discipline. So let’s embrace some of the motivational quotes of retired four-star general in the United States Army Colin Powell.
You’re a storytelling genius full of brilliant ideas, right? You don’t need things like “structure” and “rules” to write a good story.
Or do you?
The Six Core Questions of Story Grid identify the fundamental elements of your story. They’ll help you figure out what your story is truly about, and what you need to include in it to turn it into a book readers will love.
Pseudo-working looks like work, but it doesn’t produce much. If you’ve ever been trying to focus on writing an article while checking your phone for social media updates and fielding dinner requests, you’re pseudo-working. (No, I’m not doing that right now, why do you ask?)
Admitting the dangers of pseudo-working has helped me focus and get more writing done in less time. See if it will help you too!
I recently went on a writing retreat with several other Young Adult writers, and Beth Revis helped each of us to fix the pacing and plot holes in our novels by using her four-act structure for a novel.
Some writing techniques aren’t for everybody, but as soon as she walked me through this outlining process, I was hooked. It gave me the perfect guideline for plotting all of my future novels. In fact, I used it to plot my NaNoWriMo novel for this year.
So let’s talk about the four-act novel structure and what some of the key points are in the outline to help you plan out your next book.
