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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This week, nearly three hundred writers submitted their stories to the Winter 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.
Come vote on your favorite to win the Readers’ Choice Award!
When your alarm went off today did you hit the snooze button? Did you wake up wishing, “I hope The Write Practice has some silly writing prompts today”? Have you been dreading getting out of bed because you didn’t have a fun writing prompt?
Now you can get out of bed and look forward to today! Run to your writing chair and write for fifteen minutes with these silly writing prompts.
For every writer, there comes a special kind of writer’s block: a moment when we run out of gas. Maybe we’ve expended our final reserves of energy trying finish a big project. Maybe we’ve pushed too many days in a row to hit our NaNoWriMo word count. Maybe life has just made production difficult and we can’t muster the energy to get the next page out.
This moment, when we feel like we have nothing left, is inevitable. Therefore, it’s important that we have a plan in place for when it comes.
I stood in a long line last week while a single checker bumbled through multiple orders, finally requiring a manager to come take over. I’m a notorious snoop (I mean, people-researcher), so I began furtively sizing up the purchases of those around me while I waited. And what I found was a fantastic writing prompt.
In August, we hosted the Fall Writing Contest in partnership with 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.
Currently I’m reading a collection of essays by the National Book Award winner and genius grant recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates. Many people view Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, as political, but I’ve heard him speak, and he repeatedly emphasizes that he is a writer above all else. He is an observer and he shares his observations with the world, and we can draw valuable writing tips from his work.
Coates’s book We Were Eight Years in Power consists of articles he wrote during the Obama years, each of which are preceded by Coates’s retrospective reflections on those essays. As a fellow writer, I was enthralled by those reflections. Here was an anointed “genius” expressing his doubts and self-critiques. There’s something fascinating about watching a successful writer still cringe at the very works that gave him that success.
Given all that, I had to share some of my takeaways, writing tips drawn from Coates’s self-reflections.
I’m not gonna lie: I hate writing the Middle.
If you’re anything like me, the Beginning is easy. It’s fun to come up with a cool premise for a story. The conflict is there. The goals are plain as day. And getting your protagonist into trouble shouldn’t be too difficult.
The End can seem easy, too. The End of a story is like the candy center of the lollipop — you can’t wait to get to it! Of course you can’t write it yet because you haven’t gotten there, but with each moment of drafting, your heart is dead-set on reaching the end so you can reveal a great twist, kill off a beloved character, or teach a remarkable life lesson.
But for some reason, there’s something about a story’s Middle that’s a pain in the neck.
Writers write. If you want to write a book or a story, but you only write once a week, or on every second Sunday when the temperature is between 72 and 82 degrees, you will never finish your book or your story.
The goal is to have daily writing habits so you can finish your book, or the story you keep thinking and talking about. And when that book is finished, you can write another one and one after that.
You probably already have the habit of brushing your teeth, flushing the toilet, and closing the front door when you come home so the cat doesn’t get out. Here are tips to help you write daily so writing becomes a habit. A habit you don’t have to think about anymore: you just do it. Every day.
I’ve found that the greatest threat to us writers is not the well of creativity running dry or time running out before we can finish our latest work or some other writer stealing our million dollar idea. The greatest threat to us lives within us. It is our own fear.
We need not bow to fear. If we can survive its initial surge, it will pass and we can get back to work unhindered. Here are three ways I survive the surge of fear.
It’s that time of year again! Time for endless cups of coffee, ink-stained fingers, and scattered pages of manic notes. While NaNoWriMo is a fun, exhilarating time for thousands of writers, it’s also daunting. Some of us still have school or full-time jobs. Thanksgiving and Christmas are right around the corner. How in the world are you supposed to find the time to squeeze in your writing?