The dramatic question is probably the single most important element in an entertaining story. Even if you are a terrible writer, if you can use the dramatic question effectively, people will read your work. The dramatic question lies at the heart of suspense, and, as my father-in-law told me recently, the rewards for writers who do suspense well are disproportionate to all other writing skills. The dramatic question is why Twilight is selling millions of copies and the average literary fiction novel is lucky to sell a few thousand.
Here to learn? You’re in the WRITE place!
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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Thunderstorm
PRACTICE
Write about thunderstorms.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments. If you post your practice, please comment on a few other practices.
Every Writer’s Dream: Interview with Jeff Goins
Today, I’m excited to be talking to my good friend, Jeff Goins, who writes the blog goinswriter.com. Jeff has been writing for years, but he recently had some huge breakthroughs: He built a blog from nothing to thousands of subscribers in a year. He guest posted for some of the most respected blogs on the web, like Zen Habits, the Huffington Post, and Copyblogger. He published articles in several magazines. And he got a book contract. Not a bad year for a writer.
Jeff recently released an ebook called You Are a Writer in which talks about how a change in mindset led to all of these breakthroughs. If you’re serious about improving your craft and getting published, you’re going to appreciate this interview.
5 Tips to Trap Your Characters
Have you ever been trapped?
Not just physically, like in a prison cell, but also emotionally or metally, where someone, or something, imposed control over you. You wanted to get out, but those handcuffs were too tight, that chain too short.
Being trapped is among the recurring themes in Young Adult literature. While it pops up often in general fiction, the theme hits hard and low in teenage fiction, probably because the teenage are often so full of this feeling of being trapped.
Show Off Writing Contest: Dissent Edition
Once a month, we stop practicing and invite you to show off your best work.
Are you interested in being published (in print)? Would you like to get better at the writing craft by working with an editor? Do you enjoy a little friendly competition? And are you a fan of The Write Practice?
Then this writing contest might be for you.
C.S. Lewis on the Dirty Secret of Language
There’s a type of question I get every once in a while that always surprises me. Here are a few:
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that incorrect?
- Isn’t that a run-on sentence?
- My teachers in school told me you should never begin a sentence with “and.”
- Isn’t that a fragment of a sentence?
- Isn’t that breaking the rules?
- Shouldn’t you fix your contractions? You don’t want to sound so informal, do you?
These questions surprised me because early on I learned that the best writers regularly break the rules. In fact, in every art form, from painting to sculpture to writing, one of the rules is to break the rules.
However, there is one dirty secret about breaking rules. I think it’s this secret that enables us to chide Stephenie Meyer and our eighth graders for not following the rules all while celebrating James Joyce for basically writing the book on rule breaking.
The Worst Birthday
PRACTICE
Yesterday was my birthday. So I thought, Why don’t we write about birthdays?
But as I tried to write about my nice, happy birthday, I realized, Happy birrthdays are boring!
Instead, let’s write about the worst birthdays we (or our characters) ever had.
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post be sure to give feedback to a few other Practitioners.
16 Essential WordPress Plugins for Authors
If you’re trying to build your author platform, you want your site both to look good and be highly functional. Plugins are tools that do both, and they are one of the biggest reasons to upgrade from a free Wordpress site to a self-hosted Wordpress site.
In this post, I’m going to briefly describe sixteen plugins I use personally. My hope is that this list helps you create a strong author platform that brings you thousands of readers. That’s not too much to hope for, right?
Five Tips to Get the Most Out of Your Writing Sessions
I can’t tell you how many times I started a story and not finished it.
Now, I don’t expect to finish absolutely everything that I start because ideas fade and change and “better” ones come into play. However, I do think that not making the most out of my writing sessions has been a hindrance to my writing.
So, I’ve come up with my own little check-list of questions, which if I can answer yes to all, helps me to be a more productive writer.
The Power of Secrets
“Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas,” says Frank Warren, “of frailty and heroism playing out silently in the lives of people all around us.”
In November 2004, Frank Warren gave out a few hundred postcards to strangers with simple instructions: write a secret you’ve never told anyone before, and mail it back. It was supposed to be a small, community art project, but then something strange happened. All the postcards came back. And then something stranger happened, he kept getting new ones.
Secrets went viral.
Since then, Frank has received over 500,000 postcards, many of which are available on the project’s blog, postsecret.com, or in one of his five books of secrets. The remarkable thing is not how widely Postsecret has spread. What’s shocking is that no one thought of it before.
