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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Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Ann Lamott said, "What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.” And I say, "Nope. Your first draft is not shitty. Your first draft is not a pile...
The first chapter of a novel is arguably the most important–if a reader isn’t hooked, she won’t keep reading. And if that happens, nothing else you write matters.
When I first started writing seriously, I burned everything I wrote because I was afraid of anyone reading it. The reason I’m sharing this is because I now know my inner critic was the cause of each of these moments of self-doubt. In this post, I want to show you to outwrite your inner critic.
The other day I met a woman who wanted to be a writer. She immediately peppered me with questions (and fears), and I actually had some answers (and words of encouragement).
Good books, good stories, are about problems not solutions.
This is something I tell my students, my ghostwriting clients, my contributors on The Write Practice. I say this again and again because people rarely realize it.
Readers want something that’s real. They want to live in your novel. They want to become your characters, and feel every joy and heartache right along with them. They want to see, smell, hear, feel, taste. Our struggle as the writer is to deliver to them what they want. Our careers and our very lives depend on how the readers feel. No pressure, right?
In the animation class I am taking, one of the first lessons on developing a character to animate, is to think about how the character stands. To develop the character through posture.
A hero is no hero at all unless there is something to stand against. That’s where villains come in.
villains
We love to hate them, but they serve a critical function within the anatomy of a story, the yin to your protagonist’s yang.
Sometimes, the readers you think you have actually turn out to be someone else. Knowing who they really are can be pivotal…not just in your writing, but in your marketing as well.
If there’s one significant thing that Joe and I have historically disagreed on, it’s the role of grammar in a writer’s toolbox. We complement each other well because as much as I love grammar and sentence structure, he equally embraces the dismissal of commas and the implementation of run-on sentences for art’s sake. When you get down to brass tacks though, I have to admit that he kind of has a point: grammar is somewhat arbitrary.
