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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It’s all too easy to forget your goals after just a few weeks, or even days. (You haven’t forgotten your goals already, have you?) What action will you take today to make sure your writing goals don’t fall by the wayside, but are a priority in your life throughout 2017?
As writers, we all deal with a lack of confidence from time to time, but some writers feel plagued by it. If you allow yourself to wallow in these feelings, you won’t write enough to improve your work. If you don’t improve your work, you’ll never build a writing career you love.
Use these strategies to keep writing even when you’re full of doubt and insecurity, and ultimately reshape how you think about writing.
There are many ways to approach writing a story: you can interview your characters first, plot the story before you start writing, or use Stephen King’s approach, which is to start with the situation.
Do you plan your stories before you write them? Do you start with a character or a situation? Do you know where your story will end before you begin writing?
These are all valid ways to write stories. But today, perhaps you might try beginning with a situation and following a character who will lead you to the end.
It’s that time of year again. The holiday parties are done, visiting family has gone home, and normal life has resumed. Coming back makes us question, “Is this really what I want my life to look like?”
So we set New Year’s resolutions. We tell ourselves, “This year, it’s going to be different! This year I’m going to write more, finish that book, put out a short story a week, finally edit that manuscript, etc. . . .”
It’s not enough just to say that things are going to be different. If we want to see real change in our lives, we need to be disciplined and strategic about the changes we make.
Have you ever been channel surfing this time of year, turned to that quintessential holiday movie A Christmas Story, and found yourself unable to change the channel? Why is A Christmas Story a classic? And what can writers learn from the movie?
This week, nearly four 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. But this contest, 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 Winter Writing Contest.
And then, I’m inviting you to vote on your favorite. That’s right: this contest, we’re offering a Readers’ Choice Award.
The word “gift” has several meanings. Your writing is a gift. A natural ability, and something to give away without payment.
You can give gifts; socks, pencils, toys. Socks will get holes in them, pencils will wear down, and toys will break. Words can create images and bring back memories that will never wear down or break.
Write with intent. Give someone you love a story about how much they mean to you.
It’s only been ten days since NaNoWriMo finished and I ought to be celebrating. And I am, but in a different way, and not for the reasons you’d think. For the first time in eight years, I did not complete my word count goal. I failed NaNoWriMo.
Being the perfectionist and goal-oriented person that I am, I found myself to be surprisingly okay with November’s outcome. So I’d only written 20,000 words. So what? It’s okay. Do you want to know why? I’ll let you in on a little secret.
There’s something appealing about a well-written villain; even though we want them to lose, we still root for them on the down-low. Today, I’m going to give you three tips to help you create the kind of villain people like to read.
People love to be inspired. It’s what draws us to stories of underdogs, great achievers, and even, to an extent, celebrities. We love to see how regular people just like us can succeed against all odds.
Storytellers often try to cash in on this audience appreciation for underdogs, but we can easily miss the foundational element of an underdog story: empathy. The reason the audience becomes entranced by the story of an underdog is not because underdogs are fundamentally attractive; we are entranced because we empathize with them.
