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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Beginning writers often start stories with a ringing alarm clock, following the protagonist’s daily routine. But what if there’s a better place to begin the story? One that will hook your reader and keep them turning the page? Ancient storytellers understood the power of beginning in medias res. Let’s find out what it is and how you can use it for your story today.
This week, we lost an incredible writer. Toni Morrison was a novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her perhaps most well-known book, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
In honor of Black History Month, I want to share five quotes from black authors that are sure to give you the push you need to write something fantastic.
Many writers dread the marketing part of being an author, believing they have to be omnipresent on social media, or pay for fancy blog posts or advertising. The truth is that if you learn a few basics about how to write SEO copy, you’ll draw readers and show them who you are as a real person and what you offer potential customers.
Mastering a few basics of SEO copywriting can help readers find your amazing content and share your voice with the world without feeling like you have to sell, sell, sell at every turn. Today we have guest writer Linda Walkovich to walk through the basics of SEO and share some SEO copywriting tips.
Sometimes I have students who say they don’t like to write. I suggest that perhaps they haven’t found a subject or story worth writing yet. Then I ask them if they have any scars.
Inevitably, the stories pour out of them, and they point to their arms, their foreheads, and their legs revealing skateboarding mishaps, fights, and sometimes deeper trauma.
Scars often hold an entire world of story. We wanted something and the pursuit of it left a mark.
Giving a character a scar can be a cliché or it can be a fast-track to deeper character development. When you’re creating characters with scars, execution is key.
Well, friends, we’ve come to end of our “How to Write a Children’s Book” series! Over the course of many posts, we’ve talked about defining your target market, creating a brand, the realities of making money and if self-publishing or traditional publishing is a better path for you.
My hope is this series has helped learn a bit more about the what to expect as a writer in this business, as well as clarify some of the more confusing aspects of the industry.
For my final post, I reached out to several of my friends and colleagues in the publishing industry to ask them what insider advice they’d give to our aspiring children’s book authors.
Have you ever had a great book idea, or started a story but failed to finish it? Did you try setting writing goals to finish your story, but couldn’t keep up with your giant ambitions?
Did failing to meet your writing goals end in your giving up?
Goal setting is not as straightforward as it seems. Bad goals reinforce bad habits. If you want to become a writer and finish your writing projects, you need to set goals that you can meet—while also pushing you to complete your writing projects.
In this article, you will learn the two types of goals every writer can set and accomplish. You’ll also learn four major reasons every writer needs to actually finish their writing projects—along with tips on how to do this.
We’re venturing into a realm where writers bend the rules of grammar in the name of creativity, but to the great frustration of editors. A comma splice is one of the most easily avoidable grammatical travesties.
Recently my publisher recommended I read the novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin.
Baldwin is known by many for being a political writer during the Civil Rights movement, but what struck me about Beale Street was how he conveyed this emotion. He does such a great job making me feel Tish’s love, desperation, etc. throughout the book such that I found myself thinking, “how did he do that?”
How did Baldwin so successfully evoke emotion in Beale Street? Here are some of the answers I came up with.
We think that we need talent in order to be successful writers—or musicians, or golfers. But the truth is, writing, like any other skill, is learned and improved through daily discipline. Are you maintaining the disciplines you need to become a successful writer?
How many of you have been writing for a while? This article is for you—though if you’re brand-new, this will eventually apply to you, too. Ahem. There will come a day when it’s time to start that story over from scratch.
