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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Once a month, we stop practicing and invite you to show off your best work.
This might be for you if:
You want to be published (in print)
You want to improve your writing
You enjoy a little competition
You like the Write Practice
Interested?
Well, I’m out and about again. Having just gotten back from Spain and Chicago, Talia and I are off to Nashville for a conference. I like to travel, and I like to meet new people, but it makes resting a challenge.
Is driving or flying or taking the train restful?
My name is Anna and I am from Filer, Idaho, where the men fight over water rights and the women over 1st place ribbons for peach pie. I lived with my four sisters in the attic of my parent’s barn-red farmhouse with purple and orange shag carpet. When I was fifteen, I would sneak out my window to meet Brett. Brett sang me songs on his guitar and shared his dreams about becoming the next John Lennon. Two years later, on the night Brett left, he gave me a pale green sapphire ring with delicate flanking diamonds. A ring which—two years after that—my mother made me throw in the trash because she (who’d married a man who’d given her a twenty year-old daughter and a nineteen year-old marriage certificate) had found the man I would marry.
PRACTICE
Write about the spring.
Write for fifteen minutes, and when you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section.
And if you post, be sure to comment on a few others.
As I was riding across the steppes of Outer Mongolia (it hurt to sit down for a year afterwards), beneath horizons that appeared to be of limitless blue, I thought this was a country that called for an elemental style.
I’ve always loved Cormac McCarthy and amongst his many talents is the nature of his prose. “Clean and hard as pebbles,” says the Independent on Sunday; “language as subtly beautiful as its desert setting,” the Sunday Times. His style has been likened to The Old Testament and described as, “formidable,” “overpowering,” “transcendent.” To me his writing is beautiful and direct, naked and almost pagan in its connection to the landscape and base human nature.
“…as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald, “she trotted obediently around and became and erratic mistress if not a steady wife.”
Most writers either over discipline their muse or ignore her (or him).
The key to solving your discipline problem is to realize you don’t have a discipline problem. You have a relational problem.
You can either be a good lover or a failed one, a committed wooer or someone who makes lots of promises but doesn’t deliver.
There is an interesting trend in writing today. I’ve noticed it in the contests we host here, in the practices, in many of the books I read, and even, if I’m honest, in my own writing.
Our stories are all very serious and dark.
Our stories are all very serious and dark.
Being funny just seems to come naturally to some people.
We all know the class clowns, office jokers, and court jesters that make us laugh.
We know our favorite TV sitcoms and comedies that crack us up.
And we serious writers may be thinking to ourselves, “I could never be that funny. I could never be that clever.” And maybe we’re right.
But what if we could be funny in our own way? What would it take to find our own humor voices?
In our visually-focused age of memes and imgur, one thing you may not realize is that people can also be funny with words. In fact, we’ve done it for thousands of years, from the boring and hard to understand William Shakespeare—nice try, Bill—to the more manageable Dave Barry. People have wooed lovers, conquered nations, and embarrassed their children with effective humor.
But how do they do it?
Puns!
Puns, puns, puns. You either love them, or you are wrong. Charles Lamb and Edgar Allan Poe both had low opinions of those who did not like puns, with Lamb going so far as to say, “I never knew an enemy to puns who was not an ill-natured man.” So if you don’t like puns, well, you must not be a very pleasant person to be around.
