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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The end of the year is fast approaching, and here at The Write Practice we want to finish 2016 with a bang. Today, we’re kicking off the Winter Writing Contest, our LAST writing contest of the year.
It’s been a wild ride to the end of 2016. As writers, I want us to finish this year out strong.
What better way to wrap up the year than with a writing contest?
With the divisiveness we’ve experienced this election season, I thought we could all use an article about understanding one another. Studies have shown that reading stories allows us to be more empathetic. We learn all sorts of new things from reading and “meet” different characters we then come to understand through their thoughts and actions.
This happens naturally, but there are a few extra steps you can take to create more empathy in your writing that will not only help you understand your characters better, but will also help you to better understand the people around you.
We all feel like we should be writing well right off the bat. That what we create should be ready now, tomorrow, or maybe even yesterday. And when it isn’t, we beat ourselves up. It’s time to give yourself permission to suck.
Have you ever looked back on a piece of your writing and cringed? Not necessarily because of its quality, but because you realize you would write the story differently now that some time has passed. You realize you were impulsive in writing about a life-changing situation, that your views on the experience have changed after having the time to reflect.
As writers, we love to draw from our own real-life stories in our work. Whether in a memoir, a creative essay, or a blog post, we can be eager to document the experiences we go through. Let’s look at the power of personal experiences and the trick to writing about them effectively.
Characterization is one of the most important aspects of writing good fiction. Characterization is what gives authors the power to sway their readers. It’s how you get your reader to fall in love with—or despise—the characters in your book.
Let’s look at a characterization strategy that will pique your readers’ curiosity. I call it the Eyepatch Technique.
Do you listen to and trust your imagination? Become an improviser with your writing and learn to do so. Say yes to your story idea and don’t block your creativity.
To improvise means to create and perform (music, drama, or verse) spontaneously or without preparation; and to produce or make (something) from whatever is available.
Patricia Ryan Madson’s book Improv Wisdom shows us how to apply the concepts of improvisational theater to deal with real-life challenges. Today, I will look at how the concepts of improv can also apply to how we approach our writing.
I am not a poet but I read poems regularly. Their succinct and succulent lines transform the way I see the world around me, fill my head with color and sound and taste and most important of all to me, emotion. And all without lots of words.
If you can’t quite say what you’re getting at, playing with metaphor-making may unlock your voice and expand your piece. And even if you don’t think you need metaphors for your writing, metaphor-making may unlock new ideas for you.
You have good taste. It’s why you got into this whole “writing” in the first place—you’re aware of good writing when you read it. Of course, this has both an upside and a downside.
The upside: you know good writing when you read it, so you know what you want your writing to be.
The downside: you know good writing when you read it, so you know your writing has a long way to go.
Today is the first of November. For many writers, that means one thing: National Novel Writing Month has begun.
One thing’s for sure: writing 50,000 words in 30 days takes a lot—a lot of dedication, of imagination, of perseverance. It’s important to know why you’re writing at all. Focusing on that reason for starting will help you power through when the writing gets hard and you’re tempted to quit.
There are hundreds of reasons to write a book in just thirty days. Today, though, I’ll focus on just one.
NaNoWriMo is a fun thing lots of writers do each year. In order to write 50,000 words in just 30 days, they write thousands of words every single day. Whether you’re writing a novel in a month or not, though, writing every day is actually a really valuable habit to develop.
Don’t believe me? Then check out these quotes from authors and bloggers, which will inspire you next month and beyond!
