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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Commas matter. That tiny period-with-a-tail can change the meaning of your entire sentence, and your use of it quickly demonstrates just how well you know the English language.
Today, I have just a few comma tips for you. This is nowhere near an exhaustive guide, but if you learn these 8 comma rules, you’ll give a better impression with your written word everywhere you go.
Ultimately, heroes confront death. They rise against the most powerful villains and the worst sources of evil imaginable.
And on their journeys, they often suffer the consequences of tangling with these bad guys.
But not all heroic journeys require villains on the scale of Sauron and Voldemort and Emperor Palpatine. Some villains are local bullies, arrogant coworkers, and voices of doubt in our heads. And even these villains require heroic efforts to overcome.
It’s time to tackle a difficult yet important step in your heroic story: the Resurrection.
If you get this step right, you’ll have a story on your hands that readers won’t be able to get enough of.
Let’s dive in!
Have you ever heard of a fake-out ending? Maybe you’ve come across it when discussing how to tie up your story after the climax, or you’ve seen it as part of the road back moment in the Hero’s Journey.
Every story has that moment when everything seems okay. The dust has settled. The hero has their object of desire in hand. And for a moment, there’s peace.
But then all hell breaks loose.
This is the fake-out ending: that classic neck-breaking part of the story that thrills readers and audience members practically every time—grabbing them at the exact moment they thought everything was okay.
Here’s how you can write the fake-out ending during your protagonist’s road back, Hero’s Journey-style.
Writing your story’s climax isn’t easy. And even when you outline it properly, including a great villain and a high-stakes task, putting it all into words can be quite a challenge. Perhaps the most challenging part of it, though, isn’t getting the words down. It’s getting the right words down.
If you’ve ever written a book, you know that writing the middle of your story is tough. There’s a reason the saying “muddle through the middle” is common language in a writer’s conversation. Your protagonist must face Hero’s Journey Trials and make Allies and Enemies in these moments. How can you do this?
By studying The Hero’s Journey, an age-old story structure theorized by Joseph Campbell. When you master the Hero’s Journey’s twelve steps, constructing the middle of your story—by focusing on tests and Trials—gets easier.
In this article, you’ll learn writing strategies to help you raise the stakes and successfully develop one of twelve important steps in the Hero’s Journey—and the longest one at that.
Here’s what to do.
Revision is more than just correcting the comma splices and subject-verb agreement. Some bad writing is just awkward and unclear.
As I’ve worked to develop a working writing style, it’s taken me a lot of awkward sentences, phrases, and words, but after editing (and many writing lectures from Joe), I’ve developed a few tips to avoid the bad writing. Here are six tips that helped make my writing better (hopefully they help you, too!).
In order for your hero to embark on an epic journey, they must first cross a threshold and leave their ordinary world. In fact, the fifth stage of the Hero’s Journey is Crossing the Threshold. Here’s how to master this pivotal scene.
The choices your characters make within your story are shaped by their past, which means sometimes, you’ll need to communicate to your reader events that happened before your story began. Not sure how? Try memory or backstory to share the past in the present.
Great stories are filled with great characters. One of the most common characters in any story is the Mentor, an essential character if you’re writing a Hero’s Journey story. In fact, the fourth step of the Hero’s Journey is Meeting the Mentor. Who is your hero’s mentor, and how do they challenge them?
As you may know, the Hero’s Journey is an archetypal story theorized by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. And in practically every heroic story, there is a character that helps the hero rise from nobody to a somebody.
Getting that character right can be the difference between writing a story that readers love and one they put down and forget.
New goals can be stressful, and even a momentary lapse can make a person want to scream and kick and cry. Perhaps eat an entire pint of ice cream. Perhaps lay on the couch and wallow in self-pity, lamenting over the magnificent writing career that could’ve been if only you hadn’t skipped writing that one day.
Today I’m going to ask you to think about your writing a little differently, and hopefully renew some of the enthusiasm you may have already lost.
