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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So you want to know how to write a suspense novel. I could tease you with this, play out the line, dangle the carrot tantalizingly in front of you. But I won’t.
I’ll just tell you outright that suspense is my baby, my favorite of all the genres. If you’ve ever experienced those delicious moments as a reader, when your heart is slamming around in your chest, your palms are sweaty, and you can’t turn the pages fast enough, you’ll know what I mean by suspense.
Even after you finish a book it can be hard to repeat the process. Today, author Noel Stark shares how 100 Day Book accelerated her book writing process to help her finish drafts faster.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most famous and original American poets. Her style challenged the typical poetic formats of her time, and her poems are enjoyed by people of all walks of life. Here are some of.the most famous Emily Dickinson poems.
How do you tell a great story? Perhaps the best way to judge a story is by how good the climax is.
If your story isn’t good, the climax will be muddled or boring. A good story, though, will bring together all the tension that has been building since the exposition into one perfect scene that overwhelms the audience and leaves them in awe.
What is the climax, though? And how do you write a good one?
Tempted to write a morality story? As exciting as an epic battle scene can be, sometimes the most impactful stories relate to internal battles instead—a character’s fight between doing right or wrong, upholding their values or succumbing to temptation. Here are 20 morality story ideas to get your creative juices flowing and your character fighting for what’s right.
If you have a main character whose crisis tempts them to veer outside of their values, then you likely have a morality plot. Sometimes the choice is one of selfishness at the expense of others, other times, it is selflessness at the expense of self. But the character’s moral fiber, their soul, is always on the line. Let’s look at how to write a temptation or morality plot.
If you’re looking for famous poems for National Poetry Month (or any month), try Langston Hughes. His musicality and voice make him one of the most beloved American poets. Here are a few of Langston Hughes’ most famous poems.
A little over ten years ago, I had almost a decade of English teaching experience, a couple years paid freelance writing work, several creative writing university courses under my belt, and a few small publications in poetry and nonfiction. A friend’s mom, Mae, had written a query letter for her second novel. She asked me to read it and give her some writing feedback. What could go wrong?
When Mae asked, I had not attempted to write an entire novel or a query letter. I had read thousands of novels and a few letters, but I had not studied the structure and requirements of each. I assumed writing was writing. Surely with a degree in English and a little experience, I was qualified to give good feedback?
Nope. Not even close.
So you wrote a story or a novel or a book. You’re proud. You’re excited. Visions of publishing dance in your head. Then you go back and read your story or novel or book, and you think, “Well, this is good and I feel proud of it. But it doesn’t match up to the stories/novels/books I know and love.”
You wrote a GOOD story, but not a GREAT one. Worse, you don’t know why. It might be that you’re missing a crisis.
When you think of a love story, you probably think of the romance genre: a cover with a bodice-ripping hunk and a woman with hair streaming in the wind. But love stories show up in nearly every genre you can imagine, either as a main plot or as a subplot.
Why is that? What is a love story and why is this plot type so versatile? Let’s take a look.
