Creative Writing Prompts for Animal Lovers
Today’s post includes a selection of prompts from 1200 Creative Writing Prompts. Enjoy! Animals have played a significant role in literature throughout history. They appear in poems and stories, and plenty of nonfiction works have been written about animals and humans’ experiences with animals. From E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web to Jane Goodall’s books on primatology, authors…Read More
Communicating with Poetry: The Search for Deeper Meaning
The search for deeper meaning in a poem implies that it might contain a hidden message. But poetry is not coded messaging; it’s artful communication. It’s more useful to ask what a poem communicates than to ask what it secretly means. Some poems are straightforward; there’s no interpretation to be made because they are clear…Read More
Homophones: Weather and Whether
Homophones are words that sound alike but have different meanings. They confuse readers and writers, and are often the source of frustrating spelling mistakes. There are lots of tricks available to help you differentiate between homophones. In some cases, you can use mnemonics to remember which spelling to use. In other cases, you just have…Read More
Invigorate Yourself with These Creative Writing Projects
Do you ever feel like you’re in a writing slump? You can’t find a project worth committing to, or you have so many ideas, you can’t choose just one. You fill your notebooks and journals, but you can’t find a sense of purpose in what you’re doing. Maybe you spend a lot of time thinking…Read More
How to Prepare to Work with Beta Readers
Beta readers are people who read your manuscript before you polish it for publication or submission to a literary agent or publisher. Unlike editors, beta readers are unpaid volunteers who provide feedback that you can use to make improvements to your work. However, before you round up your beta readers, you should have a plan…Read More
How to Write a Book
Almost every writer on the planet wants to write a book. Some have finished a manuscript and others are already published, but many more dream, talk, and think about completing a full draft and seeing their name on a book cover. Some already have a book in the works while others have several half-finished drafts…Read More
A Few Favorite Journal Writing Tools and Resources
We usually understand a journal to be a place for writing about ourselves, but journals can be used for plenty of other purposes, many of which are especially useful to writers. I’ve had my share of adventures in journal writing. As a teen, I kept a diary. Later, I had a poetry journal. I tried…Read More
Family-Inspired Poetry Prompts
Writers are always looking for new ideas. Sometimes we look so far and wide for inspiration that we’re oblivious to what’s right in front of us. They say, “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family.” In life, we are presented with many choices, but family is not one of them. It’s…Read More
Fiction Writing Exercises: Narrative Arcs
Today’s fiction writing exercise is an excerpt from my book, Story Drills: Fiction Writing Exercises. This one focuses on story structure and examines narrative arcs within stories and across multiple scenes and installments of a story. Enjoy! Narrative Arcs An arc has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The events within an arc result…Read More
Genres: Literary Fiction vs. Everything Else
In creative writing, we talk about form and genre. Form is what we write: fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. Genre is how we further classify each of these forms. In fiction writing, there’s literary fiction and everything else. In fact, literary fiction and all the other genres are so at odds with each other that…Read More
