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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For every artist who struggles with transforming passion into actual and tangible, remember this:
There is no magic, no luck, no splash of momentary inspiration that will replace the call of the work in front of us.
We must be fully present in our practice.
How?
Not long ago in my writing career, my readership reached an all-time low. It was a pretty drastic drop. My writing was inconsistent, and so were my topics. I wasn’t giving anyone a reason to follow me. But even without the readers, I still had an urge to write.
It was then I made the mistake of making my writing about myself.
Foreshadowing is common enough in storytelling: the burning scar of Harry Potter, Peeta Mellark’s ability to frost cakes, all the hand motifs in Arrested Development, everything in LOST. A well-placed note of foreshadowing can come back to the reader as a smack on the head or a revelatory twist ending. One of the most well-known foreshadowing techniques gets its name from the playwright Anton Chekhov. He famously said that if there is a rifle onstage in the first act, then it absolutely must go off in the second or third act. If it’s not going to go off, it’s got no business being present.
This object, skill, or other source of foreshadowing is referred to as Chekhov’s gun.
When you’re only just starting out as a writer, there are so many questions to be considered before you even begin: what to write about, the genre, the style, how often you should practice, and many technical ones that keep piling up the more you actually involve in the craft of writing.
Those are things that inevitably hit everyone sooner or later, so the proliferation of writing tips and advice shouldn’t be surprising at all. Most of the literary masters have offered invaluable counsel on the matters. This wide range of writing tips is good because it means there’s a bigger chance that somebody will find another person to relate to.
Are you on Twitter? If you’re a writer and you’re not using the social media source, you should probably change that.
Many of our favorite stories have an item that our heroes are attempting to retrieve. Sometimes that item has significance to the plot, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the titular lost ark ends up getting Indiana Jones out of a precarious situation. And sometimes the item is just an item that the heroes need to find because, well, something needs to run the plot of this thing.
In that case, the item is called a MacGuffin.
I took a poetry class to fulfill one of my workshop requirements for my master’s in Writing and Publishing. Although I didn’t have much prior experience with poetry beyond some teenage scribbles, I discovered a new way of playing with language.
And in the process, I also realized writing poetry helped me to write better, stronger prose. Here are four things I learned about poetry that apply to writing prose:
Can contemporary, realistic fiction mix with fantasy?
The quick answer is: Of course! But the more difficult question may be: How?
How does one create a balance between realistic cities and settings verses making up a new and interesting world? Between believable and likeable characters verses amazing, heroic personas?
Are these elements mutually exclusive?
Are you staring at a computer screen with no idea what do or what to write? This is often called Writer’s Block, but I think it should be called “Feeling Stuck Because Your Character’s Won’t Talk to You.” Your characters do, after all, run the show.
Here are two tricks to get back in touch with your characters.
We discussed purple prose a few weeks ago, and as Newton’s Third Law of Motion states, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Or something like that; my college Practical Physics class involved making ice cream with liquid nitrogen. And the equal and opposite reaction to purple prose is beige prose.
