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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Road trips yield great stories. Why? Because a road trip forces you, your family, your friends, or your characters into uncomfortable and new situations. Add to that the potential for various complications and conflict, and you have all the ingredients for a terrific story. Try one of these new 21 road trip prompts today to get your own story on its way.
Let’s understand what we mean when we’re talking about “voice” in a passive sentence versus an active voice sentence. In this case, grammatical voice refers to the verb form used in relationship with the subject and receiver of the action.
(This should not be confused with author voice which is more about the personality and style of a writer throughout their work. That’s something entirely different.)
If you’re still confused, let’s look at some examples that will help you see the difference, and then look at how to use each type of sentence to its best effect. Ready?
Although I call myself a writer, the last few months I haven’t been writing. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but somewhere between ghostwriting projects and blog posts, I just stopped.
I couldn’t put words on a page, and when I did, the words barely made sense. I stopped writing for a total of three months and no matter what I did, nothing seemed to help. None of the writer’s block tricks were working.
It took me a few weeks to realize that it wasn’t writer’s block I was dealing with. It was writer’s burnout.
Every great heroic story has that moment. It’s the deep breath before the plunge. The calm before the storm. The quiet before the calamity. In the Hero’s Journey, it’s the Approach before the Ordeal.
It’s an essential moment you need to plan for and build around as you draft your story. And to do it right, you’re going to need to figure out three key elements.
Dialogue can make your story. In fact, as Shakespeare knew, you can tell a whole story just through authentic dialogue.
Good stories are about real people, and people in real life love to talk to each other. We are biologically disposed to receive pleasure from conversation.
If you want to write good stories, learn how to write effective dialogue. In this article, you can learn sixteen dialogue tips that will help you take everyday conversations and turn them into stretches of dialogue that benefit your story.
Writing tension can be tricky. Have you ever received feedback that a scene is boring or should be cut, but you know that it’s crucial to the overall plot? What do you do? You probably need help writing tension, taking the scene from good to great. Let's look at eight...
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. That’s why these famous first lines of books are a terrific opportunity to learn from the masters of fiction. Take a look and see if one of your own favorites is here.
A few weeks ago, our group of friends was planning a potluck. One of the girls said she was planning on making vegetarian chili, cornbread, or baking cookies. I cringed internally because the flow of the sentence was wrong and hurt me on the inside. The issue: mismatched parallelism.
With the fantasy genre, the potential for conflict and world ending threats can come from anywhere—magical creatures, an unfamiliar city or world, an evil sorcerer. These prompts will help you write about the fantasy world and before you know it, your protagonist will be well on their way to find the magic item they need to defeat the villain.
Here’s a secret: I’ve never been explicitly taught not to split infinitives (or to not split infinitives?). Surprise!
If that statement’s a shocking pronouncement, or if it makes no sense at all, never fear. Let’s take a step back and look at the long, illustrious history of split infinitives.
