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.
Check out the latest articles below or find ones that match your interest in the sidebar.
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Metaphor is a speeding train, pulling readers down the tracks of your story.
Simile, on the other hand, goes down easy like a glass of iced tea, but it’s forgettable like the canned lines in a greeting card.
Are you making full use of the power of metaphor in your writing? Or are you leaning on simile?
Do you know what a logline is? If you’re not a screenwriter, chances are good that you don’t. And that’s a shame, because loglines are great tools for any writer.
Allow me to enlighten you. A logline is a very brief summary that gets across your story in the smallest possible space.
Most importantly, when you story starts to get confusing and messy, loglines can help you get your story back on track.
So we now all know when to use “afterward” and “afterwards” thanks to last week’s -ward/-wards post, right? Good, because there’s another usage bomb about to drop. Occasionally, we confuse “afterward” and “afterword” as well. One is a noun. The other is an adverb. The meanings are not the same.
Just a reminder, if you didn’t win this writing contest it doesn’t mean:
You are a writer if you choose to be one. You are good because you practice by writing hundreds of pieces like the one you submitted to this contest. And your words are powerful things.
The Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as you probably know, was not awarded this year. The fiction panel nominated three books from a reading list of 300. (Can you imagine reading 300 books in a year?)
However, the Pulitzer board didn’t pick any of them. And we don’t know why. Were they not good enough? Were they not American enough? We don’t know. All we know is the Pulitzer Prize for fiction wasn’t awarded this year.
However, Michael Cunningham’s article on how the three Pulitzer nominees were chosen is a fascinating guide for how to angle for the Pulitzer.
If you want to win the Pulitzer, here’s how in five (not-so) easy steps…
There’s a class of people being formed today who make their living from the internet, giving them freedom to travel around the world, sometimes with their whole family. What would their life be like? What would be the specific challenges of their lifestyle?
Write about Internet Nomads.
Write for fifteen minutes, and when you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section.
Today is the last day to enter July’s Show Off Writing Contest. We’re looking forward to reading your work!
When John Hopkins’ researchers examined jazz pianists’ brains while they improvised, they found something surprising. The jazz musicians were able to turn off the part of their brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which scientists believe powers self-control and keeps us from doing things that would appear strange or dangerous. The musicians also activated the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with individuality.
As Jonah Lehrer says, they were able to “inhibit their inhibitions” and “channel their artistic identity.”
Is there one secret for success when writing stories? Yes!
Just as the secret in retailing is location, location, location, so the strategy for enduring success in fiction writing is Structure! That seems odd if we consider that real life has little or no structure, other than that imposed on us.
We need a sense of form in our lives just as we need food. It seems to be engrained in our genetic structure. The perception of form creates meaning, all by itself. If we look at a flower, a miracle of structure, we infer a sense of meaning in its creation.
In 2009, I was sitting Kenya in my friend’s yard, watching the chickens chase each other and drinking Kenyan chai, a strange, delicious tea that contains nicotine instead of caffeine, when I made a decision:
It was time to write the novel I’d long been avoiding.
I only had a tiny netbook computer, whose screen was about the size of my hand, but fueled by about ten cups of tea a day, I started writing my novel. One-thousand words turned into five, five-thousand words turned into ten.
Then, 15,000 words into the novel I got stuck, and everything fell apart. The novel had major structural flaws, the tea was giving me… digestive problems, and soon, I had to leave Kenya for Uganda, effectively ending my writing. Dozens of hours of work were wasted.
Or were they?
I recently finished writing my first book—an action-packed thriller that’s a 110,000-word whopper of a tale.
It was the most fun I’d ever had, but I learned a lot during the process (as we tend to do when we write a book for the first time!).
Part of the process for me was in structure, outlining, and building characters that didn’t seem like cardboard cutouts, but what I want to talk about today is the idea of pacing.
In a thriller, like Dan Brown’s or James Rollins’ stuff, pacing is everything. Lose the tempo, and you lose the reader.
Arguably, it’s no different in any kind of fiction, so I thought this might be a helpful topic to other writers. Here’s a breakdown of things to keep in mind as you write:
