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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Possessives are a funny thing. When used correctly, they add much-needed clarity to our sentences. But they seem to confound our apostrophe rules.
Let’s sort out this grammar conundrum, shall we? With these rules mastered, you’ll clear up your readers’ confusion and use possessives like a pro.
I see this in comments on The Write Practice all the time. “I want to be a writer, but I know nothing about grammar.” I don’t have a degree in English or Journalism, either.
I am, though, a writer. For those of you who have decided you are a writer too, you don’t need a degree in English or be an expert in grammar. There are a few grammar hacks I’ve learned that have helped me.
If you’re a writer, you’ve probably received feedback. While some writing feedback is easily processed (like quick compliments), the best feedback takes time and energy to deal with. Receiving a flood of critiques can feel good at first. But after reading a deluge of opinions and observations and judgments, it can get really overwhelming.
Here’s how to organize the feedback you receive so you can approach the next draft with confidence!
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?
