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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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.
The new year is almost here, and for most people that means setting new writing goals and pushing themselves to be better, more productive, and happier.
Before you dive into setting big writing plans for 2019, I urge you to take time out to look at your accomplishments and evaluate the writing goals you set for 2018.
Have you ever read a story that just falls flat for you and you don’t know why? Chances are it was missing one of the archetypical elements our brains are hardwired to seek out in a story. When you sit down at the keyboard, the last thing you want to do is write a story that fails to grab and hold a reader.
Do you think about your writing too much? Do you focus too much on unfinished writing goals?
I know I do. Every day I catch myself worrying about word counts, deadlines, and opportunities I’ll be missing out on.
You’d think that this kind of obsession would make you a better writer, or at least a more motivated one. But it’s probably poisoning you, embittering you against the very craft you’ve come to love.
To save yourself from this jaded point of view, you need a way to take a step back. You need thankfulness.