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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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.
“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.
“Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” says Charlan Nemeth. “It wakes us right up.”
The single best part of running this blog is the amazing community that has sprung up. One reader recently told me, “I have to say your blog is the bomb. It’s got the best, most lively and connected community.” I couldn’t agree more. Our Practitioners are the coolest blog readers on the Internet.
We tend to be some of the nicest, too. I love seeing all the nice comments after someone’s practice, “This was so great! I loved it. Thanks for sharing this with us! Yada yada yada.” Overall, we’re a very encouraging group, and I love that about us.
However, I recently read some research that has me questioning our niceness and asking some tough questions:
Does encouragement make you a better writer?
Will being nice help us improve as a community?
Do we need to be more critical of each other’s work?
Stop being so busy.
Busy is the enemy of Art.
Busy is the avoidance of Pain, and Pain is the only way to grow.
Art comes from Pain.
Busy kills productivity.
You will never be happy when you are Busy. But you will never be sad either.
Busy, like all drugs, can become an escape. It will always end in failure.
Be where your butt is, where your feet are. Be with your fingers and in the lining of your Lungs. Going in. Going out. Your shoulders relaxing into the world.
We give names to most everything around us: our pets, our kids, our cars, the products we use, the food we eat (it’s not ‘frozen dairy-like substance’, but Frosty), the games we play. And, as writers, we name our characters, too. In fact, next to the physical characteristics we try to describe, the names of our heroes, villains, band leaders, and shopkeepers are about the most important tool we have for identifying and tracking who is doing what. Good names help both writers and readers move through a story smoothly; bad names put us in a stagecoach on a washed out dirt road.
I used to think you should start a novel on page one with a bang, that you should throw the reader straight into conflict. I heard agents and publishers want a novel full of conflict, one that immediately hooks them, and I thought, I can do that. So I cut out all my world building and backstory and focused on the central plot from the very beginning.
Now I know how misguided I was. While it’s true you can take too long to introduce conflict to your novel, there is such a thing as too much, too soon.
Well, the time has come to once again pick a winner of this month’s writing competition. I’m never sure how to do this, this announcing the winner thing. I’d like to console everyone who didn’t win, hold their hands and say, “You’re still a good writer. Don’t worry.” But compassion often looks like pity and who wants to be pitied.
Sometimes it’s better to just get it over with.
I’m a big fan of grammar. Surprise, right? But in order to use grammar properly, we need to understand the parts of a sentence. A lot of grammar deals with objects of sentences. You know, subject, verb, object. Suzy slapped Bobby.
But not everything that comes after a verb is an object. Prepositional phrases can throw a wrench into the mix.
Submissions for the Show Off Writing Contest: Spring Edition are now closed.
What I’ve learned from these contests is that we have to practice submitting our writing just as we practice creating it. Submitting is not easy. It’s painful, scary. You feel vulnerable when you do it. I like what Christy said, “I have been reading The Write Practice for months but have not had the courage to submit anything until now.”
I think the biggest winners of this contest are those of you who have never entered anything before. Now, you can say you have. You took a shot at something. Even if you don’t win, you’ve practiced taking a risk on the chance you might. That’s a valuable thing to learn.
Have you ever thought about that? Detective stories, murder mysteries, legal thrillers—these are among the most popular genres in popular literature, but have you ever thought about why people like them so much?