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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Over the next month, there is one rule I want you to keep as the foundation of everything you do during the month of November: Write it anyway.
I know how difficult this is. The inner critic gets vicious during NaNoWriMo, especially right around the middle of the month.
But your inner critic is a jerk. You can’t listen to it because the inner critic’s goal is not to make you a better writer. Your inner critic is trying to get you to quit.
Don’t quit. Write it anyway.
In a nutshell, NaNoWriMo—or National Novel Writing Month—is an event held in November where one attempts to write a fifty-thousand word novel in thirty days. It may seem daunting (and it is), but it’s also a great opportunity for us writers.
We can’t give you a fully-formed plot and well-developed characters—that’s on you. But we CAN give you some NaNoWriMo survival essentials to get you through the month.
Enter the giveaway to win our NaNoWriMo Survival Kit!
This November, writers from all over the world will be joining together to accomplish a great enterprise, writing a novel in a month!
That’s right, National Novel Writing Month is almost here, and smart writers know, now is the time to start preparing. (If you’re a Write Practice reader, I know you must be a smart writer.)
A couple weeks ago I road tripped to Franklin, Tennessee, for our friend Jeff Goins’s most recent Tribe Conference.
The Tribe Conference is an annual gathering of writers who want to grow in their craft and business in the midst of community. It was an incredible experience with unforgettable people.
Here are the seven lessons I learned that weekend.
Jill and Kate were singing “Behind These Hazel Eyes” at a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles when Kelly Clarkson walked in. They ended up singing as backup singers for her for six years until they stepped out from the back of the stage to the front of the stage, singing their own songs.
I love their sound, and their original lyrics.
I was so curious to know how they wrote their songs—how they do what they do, how they create their music.
Singers are writers. Writers who sing their words. I want to introduce Jill and Kate to you and to share their writing process. It might be helpful to you if you write songs, or would like to write songs.
I am addicted to novels I can’t put down, to TV shows I can’t just watch one episode of, to short stories I have to finish, and to movies that keep me guessing until the very end.
I love stories that grip me and demand my attention. I am on an unending hunt for them and for the suspense they make me feel.
As a writer, these are the types of stories I hope to create—stories that pull the reader to the edge of his seat and keep him there until the last page.
Let’s take a look at three tools you can use in your stories to build suspense and keep your readers engaged.
You finally finished writing your book. There’s a glimmer of hope that the end is near. It’s time to pass your rough draft on to an editor to clean it up, right?
Not so fast. Have you revised it yourself yet?
What a lot of bestselling authors and writing coaches will tell you is the hard part of writing a book is not writing the book. The hard part is rewriting your book.
Ever had one of those weeks? The kind of week where life boils over, and even if you have time to sit down and write, you don’t have a lot of writing to give.
Sometimes, life goes nuts; when it does, it’s harder to write.
You’ve got nothing. No characters talking, no plot points singing. Your story seems dumb, your twist ending feels predictable, and you suddenly wish you’d never told anybody you were going to write because it’s gonna be humiliating when you fail.
We all have weeks like that—I know I do—and so today, I’m going to give you three steps to work through those troubled times when you can’t write at all.
Do you like delicious, large, fresh, round, red apples? Or do you prefer crunchy, long, orange, locally grown carrots?
Whatever your produce preferences, I bet you don’t like red, large, delicious, fresh, round apples or locally grown, orange, long, crunchy carrots.
If you’re confused about this, you’re not alone. J. R. R. Tolkien ran into this little-known quirk of English grammar when he first began writing.
Today on the blog, we’ve decided to have a little fun. We created a quiz that will determine which punctuation mark you are!
Punctuation marks can completely change a sentence, a paragraph, and an entire novel. Every writer uses them differently and we often have favorites that accompany our writing.
So we decided to create a quiz to help you determine which punctuation mark you might be most like.
