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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Great characters feel real. They talk, act, and respond to stress in ways we recognize, with their own personal character voice. We can relate to them because they seem human.
To write a character that leaps off the page, we need to know her deeply. We need to understand her thoughts and feelings. If our audience is going to empathize with her, we have to first.
Marketing is the ongoing job of every author, so I’m going to expand on my list here with ideas I have used, as well as ideas I’ve seen other authors employ with varying degrees of success. Because this is also true: Marketing is a trial and error game. What works well for one author may not work for another.
I play kickball on a league in Denver, and if you haven’t tried playing this playground game as a grown person, I highly recommend it.
I was talking about my team with someone this past weekend, and they asked, “Oh, it’s like intramural kickball?” I said yes, although it is weird to hear someone use the word intramural outside of college.
Also, it’s definitely intramural, not intermural. But what’s the difference?
Across the world this week, writers began spinning stories and obsessively checking their word counts, all in pursuit of that magic number: 50,000 words. Every year, I tell myself I don’t have time to do NaNoWriMo, and every year, I end up participating anyway.
But a couple years ago, I decided to break the rules and I had the best NaNoWriMo month ever. Maybe you need to break some rules yourself to redefine your writing this month.
So you want to write fiction. Where do you begin? And what creative writing tools do you need to accomplish your writing goals?
A few years ago, I rented a car. Normally this wouldn’t be a memorable event. But an appalling misuse of grammar burned it into my mind, and years later, I haven’t forgotten.
You see, when I went to the airport to return the rental, I saw this wonderfully instructive sign:
Please… LEAVE “KEYS” IN CAR!
And this brings me to today’s grammar lesson: how and when to use quotation marks.
Writing an action story or screenplay can be a lot of fun. There’s something exhilarating about writing fast-paced action sequences filled with excitement and suspense.
However, it’s important to avoid common clichés—overused ideas or stereotypes lacking original thought—if you want your story to stand out. In this article, we will take a look at 9 clichés to avoid when you are writing an action story or movie!
Last time we looked at the different routes to publishing your children’s book in our series on How to Write a Children’s Book. If you decide that the traditional publishing route is for you, you will hear lots of conversation around agents. How to find them. If you need one. Through this article, I hope to answer some of the questions I hear most about securing an agent for your project.
Whether leaving for vacation or a job in a new city, departures can be stressful, exciting, and full of conflict. Use this prompt to reimagine a departure today in your writing time.
I think there are two qualities about any departure that make them great for writing. See if you agree and try this prompt with me today!
Ghost stories have a rich literary tradition, but for most of my life, I dismissed them. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I’ve seen enough horror movies to know I’m not interested in seeing another. However, I just finished Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer, and was surprised to see a very moving account of a ghost.
It made me realize how many ghost stories are in the literary canon. There’s Poe’s The Raven, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, basically all of Nicolai Gogol’s work, and more recently Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days, among many others I’m forgetting. We love ghost stories!
So here are three reasons to write a ghost story:
