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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One of the great benefits a traditional publisher brings to the relationship is a network of agents and bookstores designed for the purpose of selling books. Like sailing a small boat into the ocean, without that pre-established network, self-publishing is scary. When we are first drifting into open waters, there is so much we don’t know.
Here is the good news: It is possible to sell books without a publisher. You just have to learn how.
Do you sit down to write and it seems like a million thoughts are dancing in your head? You know, they’re just there having a loud obnoxious party. With all those bouncing thoughts, it’s hard to focus on writing. To combat those mental distractions, try a daily writing habit of Ray Bradbury’s.
According to James Scott Bell, the fastest way to improve any manuscript is by learning to write dazzling dialogue. Nothing grabs and holds reader attention like well-written dialogue, but how do you do it?
There are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for when it comes to using dialogue in your writing. Whether you’ve given this a lot of thought, or none at all, the subject bears exploring. Let’s take a look at six hazards to be wary of, and what you can do about them to make your dialogue more engaging.
A few days ago, as I was in the middle of revising my book, a question occurred to me: “How do you sell 100 million copies of a book? Is there a way to reverse engineer that kind of success?”
In this post, we will dissect what makes the top best-selling books of all time books so popular, and then look at how we can apply those lessons to our own writing.
Often times when writers dream of becoming bestselling authors, they picture worldwide success, with their novels translated into dozens of different languages and adapted into major motion pictures. One of the most important things to keep in mind, though, is that learning how to sell books is a process that starts small and, usually, starts locally.
Let’s be honest: most of the time, we have no clue how our stories will end. Perhaps there’s a general idea or sense of the finale in our minds, yet when we sit down to write the conclusion the words don’t come. We’re stuck. We don’t know how to find our story’s ending.
Despite all the troubles with writing the final moments of your story, it is possible to conquer this particular writing obstacle and learn how to find your story’s ending!
For some of us, engaging on social media is tricky. Writers tend to be introverts by nature, so putting ourselves out there can be intimidating or seem like a useless waste of time. (It’s neither, and you need to be on social media in this industry. It’s just how it works now.)
Then there’s the other side of the coin, those writers that are on social constantly, using it as a procrastination technique to keep from writing. (Don’t do that.)
As a little starter pack, I’m going to give you a few Twitter hints and a list of hashtags that will help you connect with other writers, agents, publishers, and, most importantly, your readers.
So, you’ve got a great idea for a book. You have a clear picture of the opening scenes and the climactic scene, and maybe some scenes in between, so you jump in and start writing.
But once you’ve knocked out the scenes in your head, the well runs dry, or you find yourself galloping down a series of dead-end roads.
If you’ve ever gotten stuck during the writing process, you might feel like you don’t know where to turn. How do you connect the beginning to the end? Is your epic novel idea nothing more than a character sketch, a piece of world-building, or a loosely related set of scenes?
The secret: making a book outline.
In March, we hosted the Spring Writing Contest in partnership with Story Grid and Short Fiction Break literary magazine. Entering this writing contest was a huge accomplishment for all our writers, and we want to celebrate the winners here on The Write Practice.
Every author dreads that inevitable torture of not knowing what to write next. It happens to all of us, some more often than others, but it happens nonetheless. When our minds go blank, and we don’t have ideas, we’re left with one thought: what now?
