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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Everyone loves a good mash-up. Taking two (or more) different songs and seamlessly blending them together to create an entirely new song turns old music into something fresh and exciting. The same thing goes for novels. If you take old concepts and mix them together, you can write something worth raving about.
If you write long enough, at some point you are going to experience a lag in productivity. Whether you call it “writer’s block” or “resistance” or just “a slump,” the moment will come when you struggle to put words on the page, and you just can’t find motivation to write through the struggle.
One way to overcome that lag is to lean into what motivates you. Do you know why you write?
I subscribe to several writing web and blog sites. I trust them to give me sound writing advice. But sometimes the sheer volume of advice engulfs me, and I feel like I’m in the middle of a tidal wave.
Being overwhelmed can lead to creative paralysis. I work myself into a frenzy trying to apply everything to all my writing right now. Or, I close the computer or put down my pen and count the leaves on my philodendron plant. Neither approach is helpful.
With so much useful writing advice, how do you know where to start?
The Summer Writing Contest stories are in! Now it’s your turn to vote for your favorite to win the Readers’ Choice Award.
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!
