Writing Help
Looking for a few extra tips and tricks or craft hints? You’ve found YeahWrite’s Writing Help archive. Below, you’ll see a collection of the posts we think you’ll find helpful. Besides our monthly Nonfiction Know-How and Poetry Slams, we’ve included posts from past workshops, guest authors, classes, and the times one or another of our editors added some in-depth knowledge during a routine weekly post. Be sure to check out our favorite post: the one that defines the “so what.” Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or correspondence, your reader should never be left asking… so what? We’ve also collected our best of the best posts about constructive criticism in one place, because writing help is also about helping each other write. Good luck, and happy writing!
Shoutouts Without Fallout
New Year's Evolutions Like an inspiration-type Pokemon, YeahWrite occasionally evolves. This year, that means the Nonfiction Know-how is retiring in favor of its evolved form: the Technique Toolbox. "TnT" is a more dynamite acronym than NfKn anyway. That's...
TL;dr
Well, it's 2018, and the best proof of that is how many times I'm going to scribble out "2017" as I write the date. I keep thinking I'll get it right one of these years, but so far no luck. In the spirit of both "making old things new" and "scribbling out"...
Who’s up for a challenge?
2017 has been a year of dramatic highs and lows for most of us. Whether it's a personal or a universal joy or tragedy, one of the best ways to communicate emotion and stimulate empathy is with poetry. So instead of picking out a December "assignment" for...
Greatest Hits of 2017 – Nonfiction Edition
It's December, y'all. We've got a couple more birthdays and holidays left before the true end of the year, but if you're anything like me you're already starting to write about 2017 in the past tense. It's been a year of fierce joy and powerful tragedy in...
The Rhythm Method
I've got rhythm How many songs say that? A whole lot. But as a writer you need rhythm too. Rhythm is what keeps our writing from feeling stale. How many times have you sat down to read a 500 word essay and felt that it was interminable, but a 5,000 word...
Some of these streams descend by beautiful cascades
I'm always on the lookout for a little poetry in life. I love P.W. Norris' 19th century description of Yellowstone almost as much as I love the waterfalls themselves: Some of these streams descend by beautiful cascades or in dark narrow cañons, and others,...
What’s Your Point… of View?
It's Techtober! With so many folks gearing up for NaNoWriMo and the fall writing competition season (including our own Super Challenge #6), I thought we'd skip our usual poetry slam this month and talk about a fiction (or nonfiction) technique instead....
Spoilers
Yes, spoilers! Look, as someone who, along with their friends, watches a number of shows, I can appreciate the idea that it's important to have surprises in our life. I mean, who wasn't surprised that Snape killed Dumbledore, or that Soylent Green was...
Summaries for Pitch and Page – Complete
Hey, gang. If you’ve been around a while, you’ve watched us grow from a small group of bloggers who wanted to take their writing to the next level, to a thriving community of writers engaged in a little friendly competition to grow their skills, to our...
Sijo what I did there?
I can’t believe it’s back-to-school time already. Whether you’re in school yourself or just providing taxi services to small schoolbound humans, you probably just lost a certain amount of free time in your schedule. That’s ok. This month’s poetry slam has...
A tutor who tooted the flute…
Fiction, as a genre, gets broken down pretty easily. If you think of “fiction” you know there’s horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and so on and so forth. But when most people think of nonfiction, they tend to lump it all together into one amorphous category. Even...
Look deep into my eyes
Nothing strikes fear into the creative soul of a writer like being asked to write a persuasive essay. At least, that's what it looks like every time we check our Super Challenge inbox. We get more questions, comments and concerns about the persuasive essay...
Your prompt response requested
In Misery, Stephen King wrote [Paul] understood what he was doing now as TRYING TO HAVE AN IDEA. TRYING TO HAVE AN IDEA wasn't the same thing as GETTING AN IDEA. GETTING AN IDEA was a more humble way of saying I am inspired, or Eureka! My muse has spoken!...
YeahWrite #325 Weekly Writing Challenge: Popular Vote Winners and Editors’ Picks
Rated C for Courtesy "Okay, but is it R for violence or for sex?" my mom asked, frustrated. She wanted to take us to a movie - I can't remember which one - because it was well over 100 degrees outside (38+ for my Celsius-reading peeps, and it was probably...
Palinode around
I want do-overs! Whether you call it a mulligan, a retraction, or a palinode, it's human to err and even more human to want to correct that error. This month for our Poetry Slam at YeahWrite we'll explore the palinode - the poet's version of white-out - with a twist....