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 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.
As a prose writer, I try to suss out where I can deepen and expand my stories, transform a limping clause into a sure-footed guide. Sometimes, as in the preceding sentence, I find metaphor to be the most efficient and evocative tool in my writer’s gym bag.
Metaphor, by conflating two unlike things—often an abstraction like love and a concrete object like a rose (thank you, Shakespeare)—invites readers to connect with our stories via the boundless power of imagination. Or, as James Woods says in How Fiction Works, “[m]etaphor . . . is the entire imaginative process in one move.”
In other words, metaphor helps our stories run smoothly, with steady footing across even the rockiest of terrain, bringing our readers to those stunning vistas seen only from mountaintops.
As I race for the NaNoWriMo finish line, I want to share a few tips with you to help you complete your own race. Starting a book might be easy, but finishing it—and meeting your deadline!—is a struggle. Whatever writing goals you’ve set for yourself, we can meet them together, fellow writers, and here’s how.
It’s Cyber Monday, and we’re sharing some awesome deals on some of our favorite things. Hurry, though—these great deals end tonight!
Pick up one of these incredible offers for the writer in your life. Or snag them for yourself—don’t worry, we won’t tell!
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.