New Daily Writing Guides from The Write Practice

Roman A Clef: 3 Liberating Reasons Why Writers Should Use This

Something happened to you. Maybe last year, or maybe twenty-five years ago, but it left its mark. It could be a crazy adventure or journey, or a massive trauma—or just a period of your life that really shaped who you’ve become. And you’d like to write it up as a book. The question is, should you write it as a memoir—or could it work better as a roman à clef?

Your decision will determine whether you stick as closely to real life as you can, or embellish and change things a little (or a lot) and call it fiction.

Writing in roman à clef is a choice many memoir writers make after deciding they need to fictionalize their story—and there’s nothing wrong with that!

In this article, you’ll learn exactly what roman à clef is, some guidelines of how to write a story using it, and why this choice can make a surprising—possibly better—direction for your future book.

How to Write When You Don’t Feel Like It: 5 Practical Tips You Can Try Today

by Joe Bunting | 87 Comments

Are there times in your life when it’s more difficult to write? Do you want to learn how to write when you don’t feel like it?

As a writer, You probably feel frustrated when the muse doesn’t show up, or you feel stuck on a bad idea for a story but desperately want to write one. One day you’re passionate about writing. You’re in the zone.

And then, something happens.

You skip a day. And then two. A week goes by and you haven’t written a paragraph. You enter a black hole of unproductive writing sessions.

You feel guilty, like you should be taking your writing more seriously, but you just can’t muster the willpower to actually write. This is real life for a real writer: there are days when we don’t want to write, where not even an extra large cup of coffee will get you through a writing session.

In this article, we’ll talk about why you don’t feel like writing and what you can do about it.

3 Crucial Steps That Will Improve Bad Writing

by Jeff Goins | 95 Comments

Our parents told us to try our best. Whether at school or Little League, we were encouraged to give it our all, and that was enough to make them proud.

But the truth is there are different kinds of trying, and not all efforts are equal. In order to achieve excellence, we need to practice deliberately.

Plot Treatment: 4 Simple Steps to Plan A Story’s Second Draft

by J. D. Edwin | 1 Comment

First drafts are ugly, as they’re intended to be. Frankly, if your first draft isn’t full of run-on sentences, plot holes, and poorly developed characters, you might be doing something wrong. With the hardest part done, you turn to your second draft—but how do you write a second draft?

To start, you need to write a plot treatment.

The second draft is where your story really comes together. This is where you figure out everything that didn’t work in the first draft and fix it—or treat it. I like the word treat because it looks at the first draft as a patient—it’s not bad, it’s just unwell and needs you to play story doctor and make it better.

Thankfully, the process to improve your story and build a solid foundation for your second draft doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be done easily with a plot treatment.

In this article, you’ll learn what a plot treatment is, and why writing a plot treatment can help guide your second draft.

Your First Writing Practice

by Joe Bunting | 782 Comments

Anyone can write for fifteen minutes a day. But imagine how fifteen minutes of creative writing each day could change your life. I

Fifteen minutes a day, and I can turn you from an aspiring writer to a daily writer.

How does it work?

Publishing Classes: Foundations of Publishing Started My Writing Career

by J. D. Edwin | 0 Comments

So you’ve finished your book. Have you been looking at publishing classes to figure out how to bring your story into the world? I did years ago.

It was 2013.

MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was turning fifty, I had just switched from a very toxic day job to a much more peaceful one, and I had become determined to take my writing career a little more seriously. I researched publishing classes on how to publish, and landed upon the Foundations of Publishing program (then called Write to Publish).

It’s worth mentioning that I went into this program with the utmost confidence.

I had self-published a book the year before, and although it only sold a meager eleven copies, I was convinced that the only issue with it was that I didn’t know how to market, and that if I had just learned the “trick” to attracting an agent or publisher, I would surely become an instant success.

And so I signed up, prepared myself, and thought for certain that I was only weeks away from becoming a best-selling writer.

Are Memoirs Nonfiction: Important Rules of Memoir Writing

by Joe Bunting | 1 Comment

Are you writing a memoir or novel? Are memoirs nonfiction? Or is there a difference?

How to Write a Hook by Thrilling Your Reader With Danger

by Joslyn Chase | 0 Comments

If you want your readers to not just pick up your book, but keep turning the pages, you need to learn how to write a hook that will draw them through the story so they never want to put it down. Try baiting your hooks with the thrill of danger to keep your readers on the line.

10 Painless Steps to Writing a Blog Post that Connects with Your Readers

by Joe Bunting | 22 Comments

Yes, we’d all like more traffic, more comments, more readers on our blogs. But if you’re writing a blog, there’s one thing you want even more than readers. You might not admit that you want this. You might not even realize it! But it’s that emptiness you feel every time you’re disappointed after checking your blog stats. What is it?

How to Accomplish Twice the Writing in Half the Time

by Guest Blogger | 64 Comments

Many writers struggle with time management, but I’ve taken this dilemma to a whole, new level. In this post I want to talk about how I’ve learned to accomplish twice the writing in half the time.

Some writers have a set schedule. They work the same time every day.

Lucky them.

Others, do not. They sneak in their pages through tiny chunks of time — five minutes here, another 15 minutes there.

Nothing wrong with that, either. Just try to be consistent.

Here’s an interesting fact I’ve recently discovered about myself. In talking to others, they’ve admitted they do this, too…

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