It might seem silly to just write what you’re thinking of. Like, right now I’m thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner and whether I should clean my bedroom—how will I turn that into a poem or short story?

In reality, freewriting helps get the mind thinking in language, and while you might be thinking about dinner now, you’d be surprised what leaps and connections the brain makes into interesting writing material. Let’s take a close look at the process of freewriting and how it will benefit your work. We also provide freewriting prompts to help get the juices flowing.

First, what is freewriting?

What is Freewriting?

Freewriting (sometimes written as one word: freewriting) is a writing technique in which the writer journals their thoughts onto the page without letting their pen rest.

Freewriting is a writing technique in which the writer journals their thoughts onto the page without letting their pen rest.

The idea is simply to keep the pen moving, and that every word and idea that arises in the mind is important to jot down, regardless of matters like grammar, meaning, and usability. In other words, you aren’t trying to write capital-A Art, you are simply putting words onto paper.

In freewriting, the writer:

• Focuses on simply generating raw material.
• Keeps the pen moving with whatever thoughts arise, including (and especially) thoughts that seem irrelevant or unrelated to the previous thought.
• Does not worry about the “value,” “merit,” or “publishability” of anything written down.
• Does not worry about spelling, grammar, syntax, or readability.
• Writes for typically no longer than 15 minutes.
• Creates a daily freewriting practice, as the process gets easier and more rewarding when done regularly.

You aren’t trying to write capital-A Art, you are simply putting words onto paper.

A freewrite can be done with a prompt or simply with the writer’s mind in its most neutral state. Later in this article we provide some freewriting prompts, but first, let’s examine the benefits of this writing technique.

Benefits of Freewriting

If you’re not writing anything worth reading, what’s the point of freewriting in the first place?

It might seem counterintuitive, but freewriting can seriously improve your craft and help you write better poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The benefits of this technique include:

• Getting the words flowing: it’s much easier to write towards a project if you’ve loosened up the “writing muscles.”
• Freeing the mind from self-consciousness: freewriting helps train the mind not to care about “is this good?”—a question that can be debilitating for any first draft.
• Experimentation and ideation: Because the goal is to write what arises in the mind, you might inadvertently write new ideas or come up with interesting uses of language that can then be employed in future writing. To put it a different way: language first; ideas follow.
• Stumbling into greatness: Similar to the above bullet, you might accidentally write something really good or useful, or have an epiphany that you might otherwise never have had.
• Setting down your thoughts, quieting your mind: By putting your freeform thoughts onto the page, you can quiet your mind into focusing on writing projects after you’ve finished your freewrite.

Language first; ideas follow.

Some critics argue that this technique emphasizes writing over revising, or that it encourages writers not to engage with the broader literary canon. However, both critiques miss the point of freewriting. Writers should still revise and edit their work, as well as read other writers: to do a freewrite is simply to get the words flowing, making it easier to tackle the projects a writer is working on.

How to Freewrite

The freewriting process has been honed over time. Early advocates of the process include writers Dorothea Brande and Peter Elbow, but the process was really popularized by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

Here’s our recommendation for how to freewrite:

• Set aside 10-15 minutes.
• Write with pen and paper. If you have a strong preference towards typing, you can do so, but we find that handwriting is better for waking the writing mind up.
• Keep your pen moving. Don’t let it rest.
  • If you’re stuck on what to write, have some transitional phrases on hand. “How I feel about that is…” “What I’m trying to say is…” “And then…” or even just “I don’t know what to say.”
• Allow yourself to write nonsense. Write without the expectation of being “good.”
• Do not reread what you have written until after the writing session is over.
• Do not worry about spelling, grammar, writing style, “literary merit,” or legibility. You are not performing on the page, and the intent is not to be James Joyce or Virginia Woolf—there is no “good freewriting” or “bad freewriting,” it is simply writing.
• Do this once a day, preferably every morning, but certainly before you start work on a writing project.

Once you have finished your freewrite, you can reread your pages, or simply let them rest. Upon a reread, you might find sentences, phrases, or accidents of language that could be useful for future poems, stories, or essays.

Upon a reread, you might find sentences, phrases, or accidents of language that could be useful for future poems, stories, or essays.

Freewriting is also a valuable way to get your thoughts down about a particular topic. Let’s say you want to write a braided essay about an event in your childhood. If you do a freewrite about that event, you will generate a lot of raw material that you can sculpt into that essay, and you might even stumble into feelings and recollections you wouldn’t have otherwise had.

Finally, if you want to practice freewriting in a class setting, you may be interested in the Writing Circle Workshops offered by our instructor Susan Vespoli.

32 Freewriting Prompts

If you want to do a freewrite, but need some motivation, these freewriting prompts will help get your pen moving.

General Daily Freewriting Prompts

• What have you been thinking about lately?
• What questions are you trying to answer in your life?
• Write down every sensation you notice, both inside your body and in the world around you.
• Do a freewrite in which you talk to God, the Universe, or a higher power.
• What feelings are you trying to avoid feeling?
• What do you want to manifest for the near future?
• Write down the first word that comes to mind. Then, follow whatever associations arise in your brain.
• What are you grateful for?
• What do you desire most right now?
• Write about a memory that is visually or emotionally intense.
• Confess something.
• In your head, place yourself somewhere you know very well, such as your childhood home or a street you visit often. Write down as many details about that place as possible.
• What has saved you?
• What is an important realization you have had recently?
• Where do you wish you were?
• Write about and interpret a dream you’ve had.

Creative Freewriting Prompts

• Get ekphrastic and write about a film, song, or work of art that inspires you.
• What is your heart a museum of?
• Where does your mythology begin?
• Write in the voice and persona of someone or something other than yourself.
• What is the song your body sings, and who can hear it?
• Whose name does your heart whisper in its sleep?
• What is the shape of your grief?
• Write a self-portrait.
• What gets brighter the darker it gets?
• Whose voices do you hear echoing underneath your own?
• Write what you see on the horizon of your life.
• What is the root of your evil?
• What does your healing look like?
• Fill in the blanks of a memory you only partially remember.
• Write from the summit of life itself.
• Your heart is a garden. What’s in bloom?

Here are some more writing prompts we’ve written. They’re for poets, but prose writers can certainly use most of them as well. These poetry prompts might also enhance your creativity. 

What to Do With Your Freewrite

You don’t necessarily need to “do” anything with a freewrite. The point is to get your mind in a writing space so that you can better tackle whatever projects you’re working on.

However, some writers find freewriting to be helpful for generating new work. If you wanted to, you could take what you’ve written and turn it into a poem, prose poem, essay, short story, etc.

If you’d like to put your stream-of-consciousness to use, here are a few tips on revising and editing your work.

1. Highlight Epiphanies

A byproduct of freewriting is that the writer often taps into their unconscious and finds unexpected epiphanies. By epiphany, we mean a sudden realization, whether material or spiritual, that shifts the writer’s own perspective. Epiphanies can make the unfamiliar, familiar; the familiar, strange; the nonsensical or chaotic, suddenly ordered.

A byproduct of freewriting is that the writer often taps into their unconscious and finds unexpected epiphanies.

An epiphany is often central to a good work of writing. Any sorts of realizations that occur within your freewrite, highlight them—and, in editing and revising, try not to divorce the epiphany from the context it’s written in.

2. Underline Interesting Word Choice and Syntax

Another interesting byproduct of freewriting is the happy accidents that happen within language. By eschewing the rules of grammar, syntax, and linear writing, freewriters might end up juxtaposing words, phrases, and ideas that you wouldn’t normally put together, you might come across good word choice that you can use or store for later writing.

Another interesting byproduct of freewriting is the happy accidents that happen within language.

Many writers keep a journal of words, phrases, and ideas that they might use for later writing. So, don’t expect to use everything from one freewrite towards the same piece, but notice what’s interesting and unexpected in your writing, and save it for when you need inspiration or have a different epiphany about what to do with those words.

3. Identify Unnecessary Repetitions or Irrelevant Passages

As you begin to sculpt your freewrite towards a piece of writing, it will help to remove language that you don’t see as central to the freewrite itself. Here are some tips on omitting needless words:

• First, before you cut anything, save the full freewrite somewhere. You never know what you might lose if you permanently delete your writing from the face of the Earth. Make a copy or transcribe your writing, then work off of that copy or transcript.
• Identify the main topics and themes of the writing, including images or symbols that seem related to the central ideas within the writing. Many freewrites have multiple themes, so you can even make a list of those themes and consider how one writing session might yield multiple pieces of creative work.
• Look for writing that doesn’t seem related to any of the themes you identified. The goal isn’t to identify “bad” writing, just writing that doesn’t seem relevant to those themes.
• Remove writing that isn’t artfully repetitive. Repetition can be a powerful literary device, but it’s best used when it enhances and underscores the most important ideas within the text.
• Start to remove words that are clearly redundant or unnecessary. Our article on omitting needless words has more tips to help with this.

4. Decide on Form

Will your freewrite turn into a poem, prose poem, short story, essay, article, or the seeds of a novel or memoir? The possibilities are clearly endless, but once your writing has been cleaned up a little, the forms it could take should start to emerge.

What those forms could be depend on what you like to write, so rather than go in-depth about the possibilities within poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, here are a few guides we’ve put together on different forms of creative writing:

• How to Write a Poem
• What is Form in Poetry?
• The Elements of Fiction
• The Art of Storytelling
• Literary and Genre Fiction
• How to Write a Personal Essay
• 10 Types of Creative Nonfiction

5. Revise and Edit Towards Your Vision

Once you have a sense of your themes, form, and vision for the work, let your creative instincts take the reins, and use your freewrite as a base for sculpting your next great piece of writing.

Hone Your Freewriting at Writers.com!

Freewriting opens the writer up to happy accidents and exciting possibilities in language. Whether you want to freewrite with other writers or get feedback on the work you produce, take a look at the upcoming online writing courses at Writers.com, where you’ll receive the expert attention and workshopping you’re looking for.

The post What is Freewriting? + Prompts to Elevate Your Writing Process appeared first on Writers.com.

This might seem like a bold statement. After all, there are great poems that don’t use metaphors, and writers can employ many strategies to write effectively without them.

But here’s the truth: all successful writing operates via some form of metaphor. Contrary to what you may have been taught, a metaphor is more than just an artful comparison.

This essay tunnels into every writer’s most powerful tool for generating meaning. Even writing that never employs metaphor does, in some way, utilize metaphor’s capacity for comparison. Through metaphor examples, literary analysis, and exercises you can use for your own work, you will understand how, exactly, metaphor sits at the heart of all language.

First, the basics. What is a metaphor?

Metaphor Definition: The Direct Comparison

The word “metaphor” comes directly from the Greek word metaphora, “a transfer.” That’s exactly what metaphors do: they transfer identities, altering the reader’s understanding of the nature of something.

A metaphor is a statement in which two items, often unrelated, are treated as the same thing. Also known as a “direct comparison,” metaphors can create powerful imagery and description, deepening the meaning of objects and ideas.

A metaphor is a statement in which two things, often unrelated, are treated as the same thing.

Rather than using “like” or “as” (the way similes do), metaphors are statements of being, often using words like “is,” “are,” and “became” to make a comparison. Metaphors can also make a comparison without using “being verbs” or other words of comparison.

Take these three metaphor examples, which each draw a unique portrait without using excessive language:

The first metaphor shows us the clock’s size and importance; the second metaphor shows us the clock’s ominous presence, focusing on its sound; the third metaphor treats the clock as forlorn and solitary.

In other words, each of these metaphors express the relevance of the grandfather clock without stating it explicitly. Isn’t that elegant? This is one great facet of metaphors: the ability to tell a story through proximity.

Anatomy of a Metaphor: The Tenor and Vehicle

Every metaphor is composed of two elements: a tenor and a vehicle. Really, these are fancy words for “the subject of comparison” and “the thing the subject is being compared to.”

• Tenor: The subject of the metaphor; the person, place, thing, or idea being described through comparison.
• Vehicle: What the tenor is compared to; the thing which lends its qualities or essence to the subject of the metaphor.

Tenor and vehicle: “the subject of comparison” and “the thing the subject is being compared to.”

Let’s keep the grandfather clock motif going. What do you think the tenor and vehicle are in the following metaphor example?

The tenor, or subject, is the grandfather clock. The vehicle is the soldier—and any related military language which describes the clock.

Sometimes, the tenor and vehicle are hard to identify, particularly in passages with elaborate metaphors. Here’s a metaphor example, retrieved from The Writer’s Almanac:

What do you think the tenor and vehicle are?

It’s a bit hard to find—the tenor is not explicitly stated. The vehicle is clearly the orca—”the inevitable, the black and / white blindsiding” fact. That “fact” implies the poem’s tenor: essentially, anything horrible, eventual; the more disturbing events and truths of life.

Qualities of Metaphors

A metaphor is not just a transformation within language—it works to transform a piece of writing itself. As such, it’s important to think about the qualities of metaphors—particularly successful ones.

While not every metaphor shares these traits, meaningful metaphors:

1. Are confident statements of being.

A strong metaphor asserts its transformative power. The grandfather clock is king of the furniture. There’s no waffling, no “I think it is” or “Perhaps”. A metaphor convinces us of the nature of things, and thus generates intrigue for its powerful assertion.

Moreover, the metaphor is much more “complete” than related devices, such as the simile.

A strong metaphor asserts its transformative power.

If I was actually writing about a grandfather clock, I would only choose one metaphor and stick with it. Multiple metaphors will contradict each other because they’re creating different statements of being; If I say the grandfather clock is a king, a death knell, and a soldier, the reader will inevitably wonder if the clock is actually any of these things, and this thought process will interrupt the reader’s experience and understanding. (This example is known as a mixed metaphor.)

2. Rely on a suspension of disbelief in the reader.

Metaphors rely on the suspension of disbelief—in other words, the reader knows they are being lied to, and accepts it anyway.

Metaphors can be imaginative—magical, even!—but they must be relevant.

Obviously, a clock cannot be a king, nor can it be a death knell or a lover… it is a clock, after all.

Nonetheless, the reader accepts what is being told to them because they trust that the metaphor, and what it conveys, is relevant to the text and its ideas. Metaphors can be imaginative—magical, even!—but they must be relevant.

3. Utilize the power of estrangement.

A metaphor estranges its subject matter.

Estrangement is an essential tool of art. Don’t take my word for it—Viktor Shklovsky’s 1917 essay “Art as Device” identifies estrangement as the fulcrum on which art rests.

Shklovsky argues that the role of artistic literature is to estrange the reader from the subject material in order to change their perspective. (This is sometimes translated into English as “defamiliarization”; “estrangement” is a working synonym for it, too.) Metaphor makes the familiar strange to us, and through that strangeness, both writer and reader can see through the veil of our automatic relationships to things and understand more deeply the world around.

Metaphor makes the familiar strange to us, and through that strangeness, both writer and reader can see through the veil of our automatic relationships to things.

When I tell you that a grandfather clock is a soldier, it estranges you from the subject of the grandfather clock: your image of the clock changes and you imbue it with new and unexpected qualities. (The same would happen if I told you that the grandfather clock is a weak-willed servant of time. Not so tall and mighty now, is it?)

Thus, metaphor helps estrange us from what we read and, paradoxically, understand the subject more deeply.

4. Involve concrete imagery.

A metaphor is only as effective as its use of image. Successful metaphors typically utilize vivid imagery in its work of comparison.

Successful metaphors typically utilize vivid imagery in its work of comparison.

This is true even (and perhaps especially) of metaphors that seek to describe abstract ideas and concepts. Love, for example, is often the subject of literature: according to Shakespeare, Love is “is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken.” To E. E. Cummings, love is “is most mad and moonly / and less it shall unbe / than all the sea which only / is deeper than the sea.”

Both poets approach the topic with somewhat similar imagery, yet imbue love with starkly different qualities. It is through image that Love’s nature is embodied and thus felt for the reader.

Metaphor Vs Simile

Metaphors and similes bucket under the same category of literary device. Namely, they are both comparison devices: they each compare the subject of a piece of writing to something (un)alike.

Metaphor differentiates itself from simile by being a direct comparison, whereas simile is the indirect comparison. Where metaphors involve a total transformation of their subjects, similes, by contrast, say their subject is “like”, “as” or otherwise similar to the object of comparison.

Where metaphors involve a total transformation of their subjects, similes, by contrast, say their subject is similar to the object of comparison.

As such, here are a few ways similes operate differently than metaphors in literature:

Simile vs. Metaphor: Comparison Words

A simile will always use a comparison word. The most common of these comparison words are “like” and “as,” but there are other ways of denoting comparison, too. The following statements mean virtually the same thing, but use slightly different terms of comparison:

• The elephant sat still, like a statue.
• The elephant sat as still as a statue.
• The elephant sat still the way statues do.

Metaphors, on the other hand, rely on various forms of the verb “to be”—if they use a comparison word at all.

Metaphors, on the other hand, rely on various forms of the verb “to be”—if they use a comparison word at all. Metaphors can also be implied through punctuation and word choice. All of the following are proper constructions for the metaphor:

• The elephant was a statue amongst the trees.
• The elephant had petrified at the sight of the tiger; a statue of instinct.
• The elephant: a marble statue.

You could even make the noun “marble” a verb (a device known as anthimeria). “The elephant was marbled at the sight of the tiger” offers a unique image of stillness.

Simile vs. Metaphor: Differences of Intensity

When a simile compares two or more items, each item retains their individual meanings. For example, if I said “this pancake is as thick as a Dostoevsky novel,” you can visualize the thickness of both items while still imagining two different objects, the pancake and the book. The simile is humorous while still being descriptive.

With metaphors, the object of comparison transforms.

With metaphors, the object of comparison transforms. If I said “this pancake is a Dostoevsky novel,” you would envision a pancake about 1,000 pages thick. (Sounds delicious!)

Here’s a metaphor and a simile side-by-side. Take note of how your mental image differs between these two sentences.

• The little boy clings to his mother like ivy clings to a tree.
• He was an ivy growing up his mother’s legs.

Simile vs. Metaphor: Degree of Magic

Yes, magic! Because metaphors are statements of being (whereas similes are statements of likeness), a metaphor can rely on visual descriptions that aren’t bound by the laws of logic. An elephant can be marble, a boy can be ivy, and my cat is (and always will be) a bulldozer.

A metaphor can rely on visual descriptions that aren’t bound by the laws of logic.

Similes, by contrast, cannot make statements quite as “magical” in nature. While you might make comparisons to mystical items with a simile—“she waved her flag like a magic wand”—there are still two distinct objects at the end of the sentence, not one magically combined idea.

Extended Metaphor Definition

Another device you can put in your literary toolbox is the extended metaphor. Sometimes synonymous with the literary device conceit, the extended metaphor expands upon a simple comparison to uncover the full truth and complexity of its transformation.

The extended metaphor expands upon a simple comparison to uncover the full truth and complexity of its transformation.

Let’s start with a simple metaphor:

The comparison here is easy to understand, and in fact, this metaphor could stand on its own quite easily. But it can also be expanded to say more about the life cycle of a broken heart.

Extended metaphors exist in both prose and poetry. For now, let’s use prose.

For examples of extended metaphor in literature, take a look at these poems.

• Hope is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson
• Landscape with Fruit Rot and Millipede by Richard Siken
• Habitation by Margaret Atwood

Close Study: Metaphor Examples in “Outbreaks” by Kitchen McKeown

Here’s an example of a poem that wields metaphor to great success. Read it closely, then read more for an analysis of how metaphor operates in this piece. 

Retrieved here.

This gorgeous, kaleidoscopic poem resists easy interpretation, which is all the more reason to look at it closely. I love the sense of endless transformation and searching that prompts this piece forward, the sense of smallness and mundanity reinterpreted by metaphor, and the overabundance of the spiritual in the ordinary. Great poetry often arrives at something “bigger-than-us”—lets examine how Kitchen McKeown is able to do this in “Outbreaks.”

In a great poem, each line builds upon a certain kind of tension that prompts the poem’s existence. In this poem, the speaker’s identity is constantly being transformed by metaphor, and through this transformation, the speaker searches for “god,” almost as though god is a hole that cannot be filled.

In a great poem, each line builds upon a certain kind of tension that prompts the poem’s existence. In this poem, the speaker’s identity is constantly being transformed by metaphor

Let’s first look at the nature of identity in this poem. The speaker has an ever-shifting sense of self—which is skillfully represented in the poem’s use of a lowercase “i”. The central comparison is the speaker to that of an eel, which comes after the speaker admires the eel’s size and history: the eels that visit the speaker are seven feet in length, have arrived from long distances, and curve around “the precipice of life.” (What do the eels represent? More on that later.) The speaker, after this, becomes an eel, “then rethink[s] it”—only to become the kind of thing that coughs wet moths, with skin as pale as sunbleached wood. There’s a lot of beautiful, interesting imagery here, though it’s hard to understand exactly what’s happening.

This brings us to the poem’s search for lowercase-g god, which constantly eludes the speaker, much like their identity does as well. The opening line establishes this dynamic: “i search for god but the sun is a penny.” The “but” makes god’s elusive nature obvious, but what does it mean that the sun is a penny? It’s almost as though the speaker is minimizing or cheapening what’s sacred or untouchable. Perhaps the sun was a guidepost for finding god, and now that guidepost no longer exists. Then: i search for god but “the moon is gone”. Then: “i search for comfort”; the eels come; the moon, another beacon of god, disappears, though the speaker still searches for comfort “in slant of moonlight.” (And don’t forget the moths, which were once a soul-like halo, then a cloud, then something the speaker coughs.)

These transformations are both chaser and chased. The speaker transforms towards god, and god transforms away. It appears that, in the search for comfort, the speaker stumbles upon god, an accident, perhaps because of the comfort the eels bring.

The speaker transforms towards god, and god transforms away.

So, there are two transformations going on here: transformation of self, and transformation of the search for god/comfort. At the center of this is the eel-related imagery. Why eels? They’re not exactly comforting to look at. Personally, whenever I see potentially-electric river snakes sliming around with their gaping mouths, I think, among other things, “this is not comforting to look at.” There’s a certain irony to this particular image, but the eels also feel relevant to this search for god and self, which constantly loops and folds and twists and curves like eels’ bodies do. The eels themselves feel like agents of god: angels, in a way, or else guideposts towards what the speaker is looking for. Imbued with a certain strange holiness, these eels cluster beneath the speaker’s palm to become god, which results in this wonderful final movement:

It is as though the poem has been orbiting an empty center, then crash landed into that center, only to find more nothingness. As though god is an asymptote, something to aspire towards yet never reach, something that will present itself when you’re not looking for it, and never in the form you expect. This is how every image and metaphor seems to operate in the poem, whether god comes in the form of eels, or comfort comes in the form of neon signs and pines (some lovely, ironic juxtaposition here as well).

What I’m left with, after reading this poem about a thousand times, is a sense of wonder at the mysterious workings of the spiritual. I appreciate the secular nature of this poem, how its attempts to find god feel applicable to anyone’s creed (or lack thereof), and I also appreciate how the poem’s driving tension is the gravitational pull of both god and selfhood, two strange and asymptotic forces that always leave us wanting more. Finally, I love this poem’s strange and fantastic metaphors, rich with interpretation and awe, letting the speaker shapeshift their way towards that beautiful and catastrophic plummet into the untouchable center of identity and higher powers; an asteroid plummeting, perhaps, into itself.

More Metaphor Examples in Literature

The following metaphor examples all come from published works of literature.

Sometimes, the simplest metaphors carry the most complex meanings. The premise of this direct comparison is easy to understand: the things that trouble us now may strengthen us later. At the very least, those stars are twinkles of wisdom that we gain from life experience, illuminating our paths forward, if dimly.

Yet, the operative word in this metaphor is “may.” The things that trouble us might strengthen us, but they might also create an eternal dusk. And, even with starshine, our souls can very much be blanketed by night.

What emerges from this metaphor is a bittersweet rumination on life and its many perils. Accruing wisdom is always a choice, but faith in the light is vital for anyone to push forward.

This metaphor is a form of personification, a literary device in which nonhuman objects are given humanlike qualities. Specifically, Shakespeare is comparing the sunrise to that of a person, dressed in “russet” red, walking up a hill.

It’s a simple and beautiful comparison. Instead of saying “the sunrise is red,” Shakespeare personifies the dawn itself, showing us its russet color, its slow ascent, and the morning dew that flecks each blade of grass.

The metaphor here accomplishes several things, but first, I should note that there are several different metaphors here. 

Let’s anatomize the metaphor. So, the subject (tenor) is the speaker’s heart, and the comparisons (vehicles) are a bonfire, a stone, a whirlwind, and a broken mirror.

Each of these objects describe something different about the speaker’s heart. She would like her heart to be a bonfire—a symbol of passion and livelihood. Instead, her heart is a series of objects that cannot catch fire, with each object symbolic of something else. A stone might symbolize heavy and immovable emotions; a whirlwind might represent the speaker’s capricious feelings; a broken mirror might reflect the speaker’s fragmented sense of self.

“But wait! Isn’t that a mixed metaphor?” Yes—but it’s a mixed metaphor that works. The series of incongruent symbols gives the reader a window into the speaker’s heart. By comparing each symbol to the speaker’s desired “bonfire heart,” the reader recognizes the many emotions preserved in each image, and the speaker’s own difficulty on the quest for transformation. 

More on mixed metaphors below: 

Wielding Metaphor Effectively

So how can you be a genius?

Ways to Use Metaphor

In a metaphor, one thing is likened to another. Vivid metaphors are considered a mark of good writing. Since a metaphor disregards logic—an object cannot be something else and be itself at the same time—some consider it “superior” to the simile (though there are plenty of superior similes out there).

Using metaphors is much more than writing “something is something else.” Using a sustained metaphor that is neither over-extended nor mixed can be effective:

The point is to use metaphor vividly, intentionally, and as a means of revealing the nature of things. Also, as a general word of caution, try not to use too many metaphors near one another: each device deserves space to let its full impact be felt. 

Use metaphor vividly, intentionally, and as a means of revealing the nature of things.

Use metaphors:

• As verbs: The song ignited his lust but snuffed out her interest.
• As adjectives and adverbs: Her carnivorous brush ate up the canvas.
• As prepositional phrases: The old man considered the scene with a blue-white vulture’s eye.
• As appositives or modifiers: On the stairs he stood, a gawking scarecrow.

Ways Not to Use Metaphor

Metaphors, by way of their complexity and importance, are very easy to misuse. Common instances of poor metaphor usage include that of the cliché and the mixed metaphor. 

Common instances of poor metaphor usage include that of the cliché and the mixed metaphor.

Good metaphors can become, if they grow to be well known, clichés. (Clichés are “dead metaphors.”) Clichés dull your writing. They become almost invisible to the reader.

How do you know your metaphor is a cliché? Other than being well read, you can acquaint yourself with lists from a number of books or check websites like Cliché Finder.

Another unsuccessful form of metaphor is one that is “mixed.” In a mixed metaphor, the parts of the comparison don’t match. They can be funny, but you don’t want them popping up in your serious writing. Examples of mixed metaphors include:

In a mixed metaphor, the parts of the comparison don’t match.

There’s also a danger in using metaphors poorly and not even realizing we are using them. Jack Lynch, in his “Guide to Grammar and Style” cites this “more or less realistic example of business writing”:

“Let’s count the metaphors,” writes Lynch. “We have images of a marsh (swamped), electrocution or striking (shocking), a military assault (barrage), weight (burden), translucency (clear), a physical impression (impact), and a river (flow), all in a mere twenty words. If you can summon up a coherent mental image including all these elements, your imagination’s far superior to mine.”

Lynch then gives a real example from “The New York Times” (11 June 2001):

Lynch: “Let’s see: research is fragmented among soup (among?); it is strained (you can strain soup, I suppose, but I’m unsure how to strain research); and it is starved — not enough soup, I suppose. Or maybe the soup has been strained too thoroughly, leaving people hungry. I dunno.

The moral of the story: pay attention to the literal meaning of figures of speech and your writing will come alive.”

Are All Literary Devices Forms of Metaphor?

Comparison is at the heart of art. Artists and writers seek to show you the world as they see it and imagine it—M. C. Benner Dixon argues here in LitHub that metaphors are literally how we construct our understanding of the world.

Does that make all devices some form of metaphors?

Not necessarily—but it does mean comparison is an essential tool for all writers.

Metaphors are literally how we construct our understanding of the world.

Sound devices like rhythm and meter aren’t metaphors. Arguably, the sonic representation of an emotion or feeling might be metaphors (or similes) in nature: sibilance, for example, can feel like the slush or hush of snow-shushed nights, or the stark severe susurrus of stormy winds. But devices of sound work mostly to amplify the effect of a text, not to create it.

That said, literary devices that add richness, depth, and thematic complexity operate similarly to metaphor. A few examples:

Symbolism

A symbol is the concrete expression of an abstract idea. In other words, the author uses an image to represent a concept. A heart, for example, is often a symbol for love; a lightbulb over the head represents an “idea”.

In many ways, symbolism elides the “being statement” quality of metaphor. Instead of saying “an idea is a lightbulb”, I simply represent the idea through the lightbulb.

Symbolism elides the “being statement” quality of metaphor.

When an idea is reified into an image, that image can then take on more qualities or be manipulated to demonstrate an idea. For example, if I use the sea to represent sadness, I have an entire ecosystem of creative possibility at my disposal, ready to use for the purpose of my work. Is sadness salty? Filled with unknown creatures? Does it terraform coastlines? Do people drown in it, or sail into the other side? When is it tranquil; when does it storm? Does it ever freeze over or evaporate?

Yes—if I need it to, yes.

Metonymy

Metonymy is a device in which a part of something is represented through a different part of it. It can operate in a similar way to symbolism. For example, in the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword,” a pen is a metonym for writing, as a pen is a part of writing; the sword is a metonym for violence.

Sometimes, the whole of something might be represented through a part of it. For example, if I comment on your “nice set of wheels,” I am referring to your car through a part of it—its wheels. This is, more specifically, a synecdoche—which counts as a form of metonymy.

Metonymy is a device in which a part of something is represented through a different part of it. It can operate in a similar way to symbolism.

Do you see the implied comparisons that can happen here? Again, these are not explicitly metaphors. But, if the wheels represent a car, then nice wheels represent nice cars. Conversely, a nice car probably will not have a worn down set of tires (though there’s an interesting tension to explore in that image).

Similarly, representing violence with a sword opens us up to the same creative possibilities as symbolism. What if the sword is gold—does that make violence a tool of the rich? What if the sword is dull and unreflective—does that make violence a means of self-abnegation?

Personification

Personification refers to the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman things.

We do this all the time, really. A cloud moving slowly across the sky might be “walking,” just without human legs. Or, dark clouds congregating might signify an “angry sky,” but we know that the sky does not have emotions (a device called “pathetic fallacy”).

Personification refers to the attribution of human qualities to nonhuman things.

And yet, by lending human attributes to nonhuman things, we are saying, isn’t that thing like a person? Or, aren’t people like that thing? Perhaps this is more a simile in nature than a metaphor, but still, it operates via the art of comparison, an art central to so much creative writing.

Narrative as Metaphor

At a zoomed out level, a story itself can act as a metaphor for the human experience. This is especially true of fables, which are meant to illustrate human truths with wide applications.

Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare,” for example, is best summarized as the idea “slow and steady wins the race.” Careful, methodical work often produces better results than if it were hasty, sloppy, or inconsistent. What can’t that apply to?

Other forms of narrative, such as allegory and satire, operate similarly through means of comparison. Take, for example, George Orwell’s Animal Farm: a farce on the establishment of the USSR and how political leaders obfuscated authoritarian power grabs through egalitarian language. (Orwell is not exactly subtle by making Joseph Stalin a pig.)

A story itself can act as a metaphor for the human experience.

Or, take William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies. The novel charts the civic dissolution of a group of upper class British boys stranded on a deserted island. The conflicts in the novel—individuality vs. groupthink, civilization vs. savagery, democracy vs. authoritarianism—are allegories for how governments themselves are formed and dissolved based on the power hunger of its leaders.

Notably, Golding wrote the novel during a period of Brit Lit history in which many novels supported colonization. Golding, meanwhile, wrote his novel to demonstrate what happens when people born into wealth, privilege, and power are confronted with material realities far outside their upbringing. The narrative questions who, exactly, are the savages: the colonized, or the colonizer? The Lord of the Flies is a metaphor for, among other things, the ills of rule-by-elite democracy and the moral trappings of empire.

Put simply: a narrative is the vehicle for the tenor—real life, or at least the human experience of it. 

Learn more about narrative structure here:

https://writers.com/what-is-the-plot-of-a-story

Metaphor Writing Exercises

Ready to try your hand at the metaphor? These three exercises will help you write sharp, polished direct comparisons.

1. Very-Extended Metaphors

To begin this writing exercise, simply come up with two concrete nouns. You will compare one noun to the other, so try to keep your nouns unrelated to each other, so that you come up with more striking language. For example, don’t use “apples and oranges”, but “elephants and statues” will be nicely different from each other.

Once you have two concrete nouns, set a timer for 10 minutes.

When the timer starts, write down all of the ways that Noun 1 can be Noun 2. Just jot your ideas down; don’t try to write anything “polished.” For example, an elephant is a statue because elephants can stand perfectly still, some are creamy white, both elephants and statues pose, etc.

When the timer stops, go over everything you wrote down. Examine the different reasons that Noun 1 is Noun 2, and start weaving sentences together to build an extended metaphor. Let each comparison have its own sentence, building an argument through metaphor. Be visual with your description: show the reader how Noun 1 is the same thing as Noun 2. When you’ve woven these ideas together, you’ll have an extended metaphor, which could become part of a poem or prose piece.

2. Opposites Attract, Metaphorically

For this metaphor exercise, think of two concrete nouns that are either opposites or near-opposites.

For example, “trees” and “factories” can be considered near-opposites. One is natural and produces oxygen, the other is man-made and produces carbon dioxide.

How can a tree be a factory? How can a factory be a tree? These questions are best answered in metaphor.

Write a metaphor using the two opposing nouns you chose, and explain why Noun 1 is Noun 2. The goal is to surprise the reader with a comparison they didn’t expect. This type of writing, when a metaphor joins two unalike or unexpected things, is known as a “conceit.”

3. What’s the Connection?

On a piece of paper, make two lists.

One list should include only concrete nouns. Again, things that can be perceived through the five senses. Write down six concrete nouns.

The other list should be only abstract nouns: ideas, concepts, or things otherwise intuited but not felt with the senses. Any word that ends with -ism, for example, will do—as will feelings, political and economic ideologies, deities, etc. Write down six abstract nouns.

Now, randomly draw a line between an item on each list. You should have six lines, each connecting one item on each list.

How can the concrete noun express the abstract noun? How does an orange become utilitarianism, or how does hatred become a brand new stereo system? Push your creative mind to make metaphors out of the connections you’ve developed on your list.

Make Meaning out of Metaphor at Writers.com

Push the boundaries of language at Writers.com, where our instructors will help you craft and fine-tune effective, surprising metaphors. Take a look at our upcoming online writing classes!

The post The Meaning-Making Magic of Metaphor appeared first on Writers.com.

This article helps you find the best online writing community for your own writing needs. We’ll walk you through what good communities include, how to show up in the communities you join, and what we’ve learned from running the Writers.com online writing community. 

But first: what are the best online writing communities? Here’s an overview of what we’ve found on the internet. 

The Best Online Writing Communities in 2025

Here are the best online writing communities we’ve discovered around the internet. We define these communities as being spaces where writers can congregate, share their work, learn from one another, and forge the kinds of friendships and connections that sustain a writing life. 

Writers.com 

We started the Writers.com community with one mission: to share and celebrate our writing with one another. Our members meet several times a week to learn from one another and improve their writing together. In addition to Zoom writing sessions, we also have weekly and monthly instructor-led workshops and an online community space to explore our writing journeys together. 

• Includes:
  • Regular writing prompts
  • Biweekly Zoom writing sessions
  • Instructor-led workshops 
  • Free on-demand craft lectures 
  • An online meeting space to share and celebrate your work 
• Best For: Writers of all genres, in any stage of your writing journey.
• Learn More: Membership is only $47/month. Sign up for a one-week free trial here.

The Community has been everything I hoped it would be. I thoroughly enjoy the Write-Ins and craft explorations. I have enjoyed getting to know the staff and other community members and their writing—it brings a personal touch to my writing journey that wasn’t there before. Thank you so much!

—Lola Willis, Writers.com Community member

Sustenance 

Sustenance is the brainchild of poet Joy Sullivan. Members get access to a full library of previous Zoom workshops, plus attendance in regularly scheduled workshops with working, professional writers. Members also get opportunities to workshop their writing with each other in an encouraging community space. 

• Includes: 
  • Access to a library of recorded workshops
  • Attendance to regularly scheduled workshops with professional writers
  • An online community space to share and workshop writing
• Best For: Poets and lyric essayists looking to write and publish new work. 
• Learn More: Annual subscriptions currently run for $1600. Sustenance is currently on a waiting list. You can join the waiting list here. 

Paragraph

Based in NYC but with writers all around the world, Paragraph is an online writing community for serious working writers. It was founded by MFA graduates who were lacking for community spaces outside of the university, and it has since grown into a robust online platform with regular workshops and critique groups. 

• Includes: 
  • Free access to craft talks, roundtables, and query pitch workshops, including recordings of past events. . 
  • Discounts on creative writing classes
  • Access to online discussion boards. 
  • Monthly critique groups in all genres (except poetry). 
• Best For: Writers serious about improving their craft and working towards publication. 
• Learn More: Membership is currently only $25/month. You can join here. 

Scribophile

Scribophile is an online writing community primarily for fiction writers. The site hosts many different opportunities for writers to connect, get feedback, and learn from each other, and their community is both free to join and offers paid subscriber perks. 

• Includes: 
  • A forum to share work and receive feedback on novels-in-progress. 
  • Access to community writing contests.
  • Access to a directory of beta readers (paid). 
  • Detailed reader statistics for all work uploaded to the community (paid).  
• Best For: Novelists of all genres and backgrounds. 
• Learn More: Learn more about membership options here: the paid option costs $15/month. 

Shut Up & Write!

Shut Up & Write! is an international, decentralized writing community that hosts events both online and in cities around the world. Writers congregate in timed writing sessions to focus on their work, and sometimes hang out afterwards to connect and build community with one another. 

If you don’t have a Shut Up & Write! community where you live, they have resources for helping you start one yourself!

• Includes: 
  • Regularly scheduled sessions to focus on your writing. 
  • An online archive of tips and resources for writing craft.
  • Help in starting your own community if it doesn’t already exist. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to build local community, including local online writing community.
• Learn More: Membership is free! Learn more here. 

Pen Parentis

Pen Parentis is an online writing community designed specifically for writers who are raising families. The community offers tailored benefits to help writers juggle their writing projects with the daily tasks that childcare requires. 

• Includes: 
  • Regular newsletters, lifestyle tips, and resources for writers balancing many obligations. 
  • An online writing community to connect with other writer-parents. 
  • Accountability groups and other opportunities to focus on your work. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres who are trying to balance childcare with the demands of their writing projects. 
• Learn More: Membership is free, with paid options. NYC-based writers also occasionally have access to in-person events. Learn more here!

London Writers’ Salon

Don’t be fooled by the name—London Writers’ Salon is an international online writing community that regularly congregates to get words on the page. In addition to daily Zoom calls, LWS offers classes, options for editorial feedback, and ongoing writing opportunities. 

• Includes: 
  • Daily Zoom-based writing sessions to focus exclusively on your writing projects. 
  • Ongoing learning opportunities, including classes and paid editorial feedback. 
  • Options to connect with agents, experts, and professional writers. 
  • Paid access to accountability groups, expert Zoom recordings, and e-books on writing craft. 
• Best For: Writers of all genres looking to focus on their work, especially fiction and nonfiction writers. 
• Learn More: Get details on free and paid membership opportunities here. 

Your Local Library

We’ll make an honorable mention of your local library. Many libraries have online and in-person writing groups; they’re often the best community spaces to host communities like this. If you find that your library doesn’t offer this, consider starting a writing group yourself!

Social Media

Social media is also a place where writers sometimes congregate. It doesn’t offer the same level of accountability as Zoom-based writing workshops, and since social media is often unmoderated, you run the risk of encountering writers who aren’t kind or supportive. 

That said, different sites offer different text-based platforms that are useful for meeting writers, especially if you live in a part of the world that doesn’t have much in the way of community. Reddit offers different forums, like r/writers, where folks can post about their writing anxieties or learn more about the craft. Tumblr (yes, it’s still around!) is also a place where writers congregate, post their work, and celebrate the craft. 

There are also websites like Archive of Our Own (great for fanfiction writers) and Wattpad that are designed for sharing work, getting feedback, and building community. 

Find More Online Writing Communities at the Poets & Writers Database

Lastly, Poets & Writers has a great directory of in-person and online writing communities that you can explore. The directory is occasionally out-of-date, but it includes groups for writers of all genres, abilities, and identities. 

Learn more here!

Features of the Best Online Writing Communities

The best online writing communities have these features in common:

• Supportive: Writing comes with its own anxieties and difficulties. The best online writing communities meet you at your needs, inspire confidence, and help you rise to the occasion of your own work. 
• Generative: Some online writing communities include prompted writing sessions; others simply carve out time for you to work on your own projects. Regardless, finding time and space to focus on your own writing is hard, and communities help create that time and space for you. 
• Educational: Every writer has something to offer. Yes, even complete newbies. In constructive writing spaces, writers learn from one another, offer feedback, and educate each other to become better authors. 
• Inspiring: You should come away from any writing space you join feeling inspired—whether that means inspiration for new goals, or inspiration to continue writing your own long-term projects. 
• Accessible and Inclusive: The creative writing world sometimes has a reputation for being closed off or elitist—and it’s true that some communities are exclusionary. We’ve found that the best online writing communities do not arbitrarily exclude any writers from their ranks, so long as all writers are willing to show up, be kind, and support one another in their work. 
• Connected: Writers also have a reputation for being introverted. But, even in the most introspective spaces, good online writing communities foster connection and friendship. Even if those are only friends you connect with over Zoom and email, you should still feel excited to write alongside other community members, and feel as though you know other writers whom you can mutually support.  

We recommend the above online writing communities for meeting all of these qualities. Whatever your writing needs are, you are sure to come away connected, engaged, and inspired to complete your own writing projects. 

How You Should Show Up in Online Writing Communities

While the best online writing communities exist to support your writing, learning, and community needs, it’s important that you also show up to any space with the right mindset and attitude. The more you invest into a community, the more you will get out of it—and we have a few tips on this based on our own experiences both building and participating in communities around the internet. 

1. Be Open Minded

One beautiful opportunity in any thriving community is the chance to learn about new and different lived experiences. Writers transcend all backgrounds, ideologies, and walks of life, and our task is to both understand ourselves and the world around us. Online writing communities are the perfect places for this—but only if you enter into one with an open mind. 

Online writing communities are the perfect places to understand ourselves and the world around us. 

Be willing to engage with people whose perspectives and experiences you don’t understand or initially disagree with. Disagreement and discomfort is not inherently a sign of danger. If anything, a community that operates as an echo chamber is far more dangerous, as it quells dissent and closes opportunities for growth and engagement. 

The vast majority of communities contain little to no friction, but the human experience is wide and diverse; if this happens, see this as an opportunity for connection and understanding, and you might find yourself forging deeper connections you would have otherwise foregone. 

2. Listen More Than You Speak

All writers want to be heard, and many writers join communities so others can hear them. You may very well join for the same reason. So this advice may be counterintuitive, but hear us out: you should try to listen more than you speak. 

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings.

Great communities are fostered when its members closely engage with one another’s thoughts, feelings, and writings. Community building is a two-way street: it requires both hearing and being heard. If you are 1 person in a room of 10 people, you shouldn’t speak much more than 1/10 of the time; otherwise, you might start losing opportunities to learn from other members, and for them to hear you, too. 

Don’t think about this advice too deeply—certainly, do not time yourself every time you open your mouth. But, great communities are fostered when everyone takes turns sharing their work, and it can often be more rewarding to hear someone name their own experiences: it creates new doorways for connection, and allows you to share yourself more freely as well. 

3. Know That Every Writer Has a Different Journey

Some of us write poetry; others, fiction, nonfiction, drama, etc. 

Some of us have been writing for 40+ years and have Ph.Ds. Others are relatively new to writing. 

Some of us write in the Modernist vein; others are Postmodern. 

Some writers want to publish their sixth novel; others want to self-publish their first poetry collection; still others don’t plan on publishing at all.

The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path.

Every writer is on a different journey. The best online writing communities accommodate for the beautiful diversity of the writer’s path. Do not assume anything about anyone else’s journey, and don’t expect others to automatically get yours, either. The more you learn about other peoples’ writing lives, the more you might learn about your own, and what you want to achieve in your work. 

4. Celebrate All Successes

Writing is a lonely business. We come to community to lessen that loneliness. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to share and celebrate all successes. Keep this mindset in mind with both your own successes and others’. 

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. This is true whether the success is a publication, a breakthrough in their work, or even just making the time to sit down and write for 5 minutes. If someone shares a win they’re celebrating, celebrate it with them. And, if you ever find yourself feeling jealous or insecure about your own accomplishments, remember that writing is not a zero sum game: we are not competing against each other, and a high tide rises all boats.

When other people share successes, engage with them and congratulate them on what they’ve accomplished. Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem.

Be in the habit of sharing your own successes as well, however small they may seem. Don’t pooh-pooh what you accomplish. The more you share about your own journey and success, the more others will encourage you to keep going, and the better it feels to write and be writing with a supportive community. 

5. See Yourself as a Member, Not a Participant

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

Read that again.

You do not need permission. Don’t wait for someone to tell you that it’s okay to join, to participate, to be with other writers. 

It can be so easy to exclude yourself from a writing space. The excuses never end. Everyone is already friends with everyone, why do they need me? You might ask. Or, I don’t have anything of value to contribute, why should I join?

Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you.

You should join because those moments of hesitation are simply untrue. Everyone has something of value to contribute, including you. Even if you are new to writing, or haven’t read as many books, or don’t feel like you belong. You are a writer, you do contribute (just by being present!), and you deserve to have a community that supports and encourages you.

Any writing space that doesn’t make you feel seen or accepted is not worth your time. If someone tells you to ask for permission, run—successful writing communities do not demand any proof of worthiness, as you are already worthy. 

You do not need permission to be a part of an online writing community.

What We’ve Learned from Being Part of Online Writing Communities

Here are some thoughts from the Writers.com administrative team about how online writing communities have transformed our writing. 

Frederick Meyer: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Learning

Running the Writers.com community has exposed me to things that I wouldn’t have run into otherwise. 

For example, I got really into doing erasure poems because of a community member’s suggestion, and I wrote a couple of the poems that I’m happiest with that way. I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space. 

I wouldn’t even be writing poetry at all if I wasn’t part of this space.

When I look at a piece of published writing in the community, I really get a much deeper sense of it. I see a lot of perspectives. We looked at this poem set in a mid-20th century house that had a mother and a few children and then the father was always traveling and he was kind of like this distant presence, and they were talking about what it was like doing chores all day and waiting for any news from the outside world. And you know, the poem hit me however it hit me. And then people were talking about what their experience was like, you know, growing up in parts of the world that were similar, parts that were different. And by the end of it, I just felt like I understood the poem so much better and it really resonated with me in a different way. 

It’s very much this mind meld when reading poems. And you get like this entire kaleidoscope of perspectives on it.

I feel like people’s comments on my writing have always been constructive and also have pointed to the parts of the writing that aren’t satisfying with a lot of accuracy. I’ve really appreciated that, and it causes you to engage with the writing that other people like or, in my case, since I’m helping organize it, it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like. 

it’s something on my calendar where I’m going to be really prioritizing writing and literature with a group of people that I really trust and that I really like.

So it’s been really rewarding and a lot of the time it’s oddly therapeutic. It’s been quite therapeutic on a number of occasions and some people have been very, very kind to me in various ways. That is one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way. So it’s been a really rich experience. I’m really glad to be doing it and I recommend it to anybody. 

It’s one of those things that I don’t really know that I need in a way.

—Frederick Meyer, Writers.com Director

Elle LaMarca: Online Writing Communities Transform Your Writing Life

I met my critique partner of 15 years in my first online creative writing course. So although that’s not specifically about a community, I think the idea of taking an online writing course as a way to start building your community is so beneficial. If you find people that you really connect with, how you read each other’s work, that can be the foundation of your own community. I still work with this person on a weekly basis, and it’s now been 15 years.

I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community.

In my experience, as someone who’s been a part of several different writing communities, writing can often feel so lonely because you have to do the work and that doesn’t change. Like, you have to write the words yourself, but I always feel more motivated and more inspired to write my own work when I’m inside a community and I’m reading other people’s work, and I’m hearing about their experiences and their journeys as writers. That’s true whether I’m leading the community or just an active participant. Being around other writers physically or even online is motivating and I always write more. 

—Elle LaMarca, Writers.com Curriculum Specialist

Join the Writers.com Online Writing Community!

Your voice is a gift. Share it in the online writing community at Writers.com. All voices, perspectives, and ideas are respected and valued in our community of writers around the globe, and your presence will only make us stronger. 

Learn more here!

The post Best Online Writing Communities: How to Find Your Writers Group appeared first on Writers.com.

The Rule of 3 articulates that “3” is the magic number for many essential elements in a work of writing. In truth, this is more a principle than a hard-and-fast rule: many works of writing work precisely because they don’t follow this rule.

Nonetheless, this is a tool well worth knowing about. Read on to learn how the Rule of Three operates in creative writing, and how you can wield it in every element of your work.

What is the Rule of Three in Writing?

The Rule of 3 describes a principle of successful writing: elements of a work of literature often deliver the most impact when presented in a trio.

The Rule of 3: elements of a work of literature often deliver the most impact when presented in a trio.

By “elements,” we mean virtually any aspect of a piece of writing can be effectively presented in groups of three. A tripartite sentence might have three equally weighted clauses; a novel might do well with three main characters; a joke will be funniest when presented three separate times—and so on.

The Rule of Three is not a golden rule—in fact, no rule is. And there are plenty of times when it doesn’t need to be followed, as well as plenty of other times when breaking the rule is more effective.

Nonetheless, three seems to be a magic number in literature. Why is that?

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Why Rule of 3 Writing Works

Three, for some reason, seems to be a magic number for the mind. We chunk our telephone numbers into groups of 3 and 4. When remembering long lists or sequences, like the numbers of pi, it’s easiest to do so when chunking that information into trios or sometimes quartets.

Trios present the smallest amount of information in which both a pattern and a rhythm emerges.

Basically, our minds really like patterns and rhythm. Trios present the smallest amount of information in which both a pattern and a rhythm emerges. So when an element of writing appears on three separate occasions, those occasions become linked in a way that’s memorable for the brain.

It’s the literary equivalent of “bump, set, spike” in volleyball—a phrase that, not coincidentally, also follows the rule of three.

Rule of Three Writing Examples

I’ve named the rule of 3 as occurring when any “element” of writing appears in triplets—but what are some actual forms of this rule, and what are those elements?

Here are a few forms of the rule of three in writing, with examples to demonstrate this powerful literary tool:

Hendiatris

A hendiatris is the representation of one idea through three words. It can be formed by putting together any three words that, when combined, represent something greater than themselves alone.

A hendiatris is the representation of one idea through three words.

A couple examples:

Tricolons

Where hendiatris are composed of three words, a tricolon is composed of three equally weighted clauses.

A tricolon is composed of three equally weighted clauses.

In a tricolon, each clause should contain the same structure: ideally, the same sequence of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and the like. Tricolons also do not have to represent one idea in three parts, which is a requirement for an effective hendiatris.

Here are a couple examples:

Tricolon, like hendiatris, is a form of parallelism—a stylistic device that helps amplify and equate the meaning of different ideas.

Tricolon in Poetry

Tricolons are a useful tool for poets to know, too, as poetry’s ability to organize and juxtapose images and ideas makes the number three especially useful.

Poetry’s ability to organize and juxtapose images and ideas makes the number three especially useful.

Here are two brief rule of three writing examples in poetry:

This cinquain poem operates entirely on the rule of threes, with the third tricolon element being the most surprising. The brevity of this short poetry form imbues the poem with a sense of something spiritual, too, like a brief and poignant prayer.

A dirge is a song of lamentation, often performed at funerals or wakes. Take note of these lovely repetitions of three: down, down, down; the beautiful, the tender, the kind; the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

And then, the poem intentionally breaks its simple pattern in that final line. “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” It’s still technically a tricolon, but the elements are intentionally unequal, giving proper emphasis to the speaker’s sense of resistance to death.

Tricolon in Rhetoric

Tricolons are naturally useful rhetorical devices. This is for a few reasons, including: 1), they help emphasize the most important elements, priorities, or ideas a speaker wishes to present; 2), they are useful style tools to keep people engaged and listening; 3), quite frankly, they make a person sound smart and considered.

Here are some tricolons from famous speeches in history:

Advertising

Because the above devices—hendiatris and tricolon—are so punchy and short, it only makes sense that advertisers gravitate to them. The savvy marketer sells you a product, brand, or idea in the fewest high-impact words as possible, resulting in the following sloganeering:

Notably, many corporations also have punchy three-word slogans: “I’m Lovin’ It” (McDonald’s); “Just Do It” (Nike); “Finger Lickin’ Good” (KFC); and so on. While a three-word motto isn’t any particular literary device, it does follow the rule of threes in that it’s simple and memorable.

Rule of Three Comedy Writing

An idea, a set up, and a punchline walk into a bar…

In comedy, the rule of 3 helps organize a joke so that it’s funny, unexpected, and memorable. Good comedy operates on the violation of expectations: when a norm is disrupted, we laugh.

Good comedy operates on the violation of expectations: when a norm is disrupted, we laugh.

The rule of three helps set up those expectations so that the disruption is more effective. Since we see patterns and rhythm when three elements are available, the surprise of a third element is naturally funnier.

This all seems a little abstract, so here are two examples of the rule of three in comedy:

This example comes from Simon Taylor’s self-paced course Writing Funny, a fantastic resource for anyone looking to imbue their work with humor.

A second example comes from Seinfeld. Watch the below clips from “The Pledge Drive”:

A waitress gives “the finger” to George twice. The third time he receives the finger is while driving, which prompts him to chase the car that flipped him off—only to find that the driver, somehow, was driving with a cast over his hand.

And remember, violating expectations is essential to comedy. So the rule of threes is not a requirement for effective humor. Here’s a punny example, authored by yours truly:

Character Trios

Many novels, fables, and stories only have one protagonist. But some of the most memorable works of literature have three main characters, even if two of them are deuteragonists. They might also have three antagonists, or, they might have one protagonist and three supporting characters.

Some stories with trios of characters include:

• “The Big Bad Wolf and the Three Little Pigs”
• The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow all aid Dorothy)
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears”
• The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
• The Three Fates / Parcae in Greek/Roman mythology
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future)
• Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov
• Percy Jackson & The Olympians by Rick Riordan (Percy and his friends Grover and Annabeth
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (Frodo, Sam, and Gollum)

Certainly, this is a small selection of literature, and there are plenty of books that only have one or two main characters. So there’s no hard-and-fast rule of three in character development, nor any particular reason a story needs three characters.

Plenty of books only have 1 or 2 main characters.

In the case of stories that do have character trios, think about what each character might represent as part of their triplet. What kinds of oppositions can they play against each other? For example, the three musketeers are each charged by a primary trait: leadership/mentorship (Athos), intellect (Aramis), and foolishness (Porthos). A trio could also represent, for example, the three registers of Freudian psychoanalysis (id, ego, superego), the three tenses (past, present, and future), and so on.

Three-Part / Three-Act Structures

Lastly, the rule of three appears when structuring a long-form piece of writing. Many novels, plays, and movies follow a three-act structure, a structure that has been around since before the time of Plato.

The Three-Act Structure is descriptive—it is not a rule that needs to be followed, it is merely an observation on successful works of fiction.

Briefly, the Three-Act Structure is composed of the following:

• Act 1: the exposition and inciting incident—we learn who our main characters are, what causes the story to exist, and what complications initially setback the protagonist(s).
• Act 2: the rising action—the story becomes more complex as the protagonist(s) try and fail to achieve some goal, often because of new setbacks of growing antagonism. The only way for the main character to overcome these setbacks is by some change happening within themselves or their perspective. Act 2 ends on another major turning point in the plot.
• Act 3: climax and denouement—the story reaches a make-or-break moment, the climax, in which the outcome of the story is determined based on whether the main character has changed and makes the right decision. After the story’s climax, we may see some denouement, which tells us the aftermath of the climactic moment.

This structure is better explored in our article on Freytag’s Pyramid. Although many stories have more than three events or twists, the Three-Act Structure shows how many works of fiction can be partitioned in threes.

The Three-Act Structure is descriptive—it is not a rule that needs to be followed, it is merely an observation on successful works of fiction. But the fact that we observe successful stories often operating in three parts further confirms the unconscious power that the number three has in literature.

Tips For Using The Rule of Three in Writing

Here are some tips for wielding the rule of 3 in your writing.

1. Keep Items Equally Weighted

There’s a reason the slogan isn’t “live, expel air rhythmically and in good humor, love.”

The rule of three works when each of the three elements are equally weighted.

The rule of three works when each of the three elements are equally weighted. In the above example, you not only have to work to understand that I’m talking about laughter, but once you parse the meaning of that ungainly clause, you move on without seeing the relationship of the three elements. Elegance and simplicity are key to the rule of three.

2. In a Sentence, Use the Oxford Comma

This is more a style suggestion than another hard-and-fast rule. Certainly, some style guides sneer at the oxford comma—the comma separating the second-to-last and last element in a series.

Here’s an example without the oxford comma, and with it:

Without the oxford comma, it looks like I’m saying my two brothers are Daniel Craig and God.

Using the oxford comma all the time helps you keep the writing flowing instead of stopping to think.

This is, of course, a specific and perhaps pedantic example. But it nonetheless illustrates the utility of the oxford comma when writing a tricolon. Rather than deliberating whether to use the comma every time you have a group of three or more items in a sentence, using the oxford comma all the time helps you keep the writing flowing instead of stopping to think.

Learn more at our article on the oxford comma.

3. Make the Third Element Most Impactful

We’ve talked about how the human mind likes patterns and rhythms. Another thing it likes is the final element of a series.

This is known as the primacy-recency effect, or the serial position effect. Give someone a list of things, and no matter how long the list is, they are most likely to remember the first and last items.

The last element is the most remembered, and thus the most impactful.

Of course, in a list of three items, you’ll remember the second element as well. But the point is that the last element is the most remembered, and thus the most impactful. Knowing this, it only makes sense to make the last element in your triplet doubly impactful.

Let’s return to Adelaide Crapsey’s “Triad”, but with the elements re-ordered:

It’s still a fine poem, but the impact has been lessened, here, because the most surprising element is sandwiched in the middle, and the poem falls a little flat ending on the dawn.

4. Break the Rule of 3 for Emphasis

Because the rule of three is so established in writing and the arts, we’ve come, I think, to anticipate it unconsciously. As a result, when the rule of three is broken—when the element is repeated a fourth time (Tetracolon), or when a fourth item is tacked on to a perfectly good triplet—the broken rule emphasizes itself.

Here’s one last example:

I find breaking the rule of three is especially useful in comedy writing. Because we expect the third element to be the punchline, it can be surprising when the third element isn’t, in fact, anything. Thus, the surprise fourth element really throws us.

Hone the Rule of Three in Writing at Writers.com

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The post The Rule of Three in Writing: How the Number 3 Can Transform Your Work appeared first on Writers.com.

When I was first asked to write an article on the rules of poetry, I briefly short-circuited. There are no rules of poetry, I was about to say, that’s the whole point of writing it. 

Many of my fellow poets will tell you the same thing. It’s not that there aren’t principles of successful poetry, but to say there are rules implies a strict set of dos and don’ts—and any poem that doesn’t conform is, ultimately, not a poem.

I don’t believe that to be true, and I actually love poems that break the rules of poetry. Nonetheless, there are definitely worthwhile guidelines to know about, whether poets choose to follow them or break them intentionally.

Here, then, are the rules of poetry for contemporary poets, with examples of poems that follow the rules—and poems that break them. 

The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets

Here are some rules you may have heard with regard to writing successful contemporary poetry: 

Rules of Poetry: Show, Don’t Tell

Alternately, to quote William Carlos Williams: “No ideas but in things.”

Poems ought to convey tangible experience.

What this means is that poems ought to convey tangible experience; they should uphold the primacy of imagery over abstraction. Images alone should convey a poem’s ideas, feelings, and attitudes. If the poem, or the speaker of the poem, names abstractions or tells you how it feels, then the poem is doing the work of interpretation for the reader, or else reducing the poem’s capacity for complexity by limiting its imagination.

Here’s a vivid short poem that does a great job of showing instead of telling, retrieved here: 

“In the Station of the Metro” by Ezra Pound

Pound here combines a haiku-inspired approach to poetry with a sharp, surprising comparison. In two lines, the whole of Modernism feels present here: its cacophonies and discordances, and the melange of faces populating a subway station in the strange new urban world. 

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Break the Line on Verbs, Images, Breaths

Because line breaks differentiate poetry from prose, they are a primary tool for us to consider in our work. Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities. The line break makes the line its own unit which, in coordination with the poem’s clauses and sentences, results in a kind of forward-moving tension that strings the work along to its conclusion. This is true for both free verse and formal work.

Line breaks introduce tensions, multiplicities, and complexities.

The conventional wisdom—one that was hammered into me in undergrad—was to end lines on important words, usually verbs or concrete images. This is an easy guide to follow, as it allows those important words to operate on two registers, both the line it sits in and the line that follows it. It also emphasizes those words to the reader. 

One professor once told me that you should be able to read the end words of a poem alone and grasp what the poem is getting at. (Of all the rules of poetry I’ve been taught, I might disagree with this one the most.)

An alternate way of approaching line breaks is to read the words out loud, and break the line wherever you take a natural breath—an idea present especially in the world of the Beats and of mindful poetry. This allows the poem to mimic human speech and thought, following your own intuition and relationship with language.

Here’s an example of a poem with concrete, intentional line breaks, retrieved here:

“Weather” by Linda Pastan

These line breaks are so good! I love the complicated syntax of a menace “opening” over the speaker’s childhood, that stanza break at “seems” (a subtle nod at the gulf of perception and reality), and that one-word line “dazzling”, which really, truly dazzles. 

Do Not Be Cloying, Mawkish, Maudlin, Schmaltzy; Avoid Sentimentality

Pardon the SAT words, but they all point towards the same idea: do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

Do not indulge too deeply in your feelings and emotions.

It’s not that poetry doesn’t have capacity for intense emotion. But, when a poem magnifies emotions past a certain point, the work itself feels unserious or uninteresting. Big feelings aren’t quite so interesting as the contexts and conclusions that may come from them, but the poet, as an artist, knows how to select only the most relevant and interesting feelings so that they don’t engulf the point of the poem.

Here’s a poem that certainly has big feelings, but explores them in a way that feels genuine and real, retrieved here:

“We Have Not Long to Love” by Tennessee Williams

He’s more well known for his fiction and playwriting, but Williams here delivers an admirable poem, both for its lyricism and its soft yearning. He toes the line well: it would be far too schmaltzy to say “we’re all going to die and I’ll never love you the way I should”—but that’s not the sentiment here at all. What we get, really, is a brief and gorgeous rumination on the urgency of love, and how difficult it is to love despite its urgency. 

Avoid Redundancy and Redundant Amplification

This is pretty straightforward. Every word in a poem should be essential. If you can remove a word or a sentence, and the poem’s meaning and effect doesn’t change, remove it. Omit needless words.

Every word in a poem should be essential.

Repetition for the sake of amplification is sometimes useful, but if that repetition doesn’t contribute to the poem’s impact (or even distracts from it) then, again, remove it. Simplify the poem as much as possible—keeping in mind that to simplify is not, necessarily, to reduce complexity; we are simply searching for the simplest ways to express the most complex ideas.

Here’s a poem whose concision is felt deeply, yet whose repetition is essential, amplifying all the more its ideas, retrieved here:

“Poem” by Langston Hughes

This heartwrenching little poem doesn’t need many words to convey the depth and intensity of its feeling. Despite the fact that it largely dabbles in abstraction, it still has motion and movement to it: the friend goes away (dies), the poem returns to its starting point; the cycle of love and loss feels both brief and endless. 

Do Not Rhyme for the Sake of Rhyming

Contemporary poetry has a rather tortured relationship with rhyme and meter.

Now, it’s not as tortured as it used to be. The Beats, The New York School, and The Confessional Poets of mid-century steered English-language poetry further away from its highly architected past. Then, New Formalism came onto the American poetry scene and argued for a return to rhyming, metrical poems.

A period of the 1970s and 1980s are now called The Poetry Wars, in which New Formalists fought with everyone else to say that formal poetry deserves more space in the world of poetry and publishing. Those “wars” are too detailed to summarize, but the point I’m making is, it used to be even worse for formalist poets.

Nowadays, formal poetry is certainly more accepted in the poetry world. The canon has also expanded to include forms that don’t hail from the West, like the South Asian/Persian/Arabic Ghazal form or the Malaysian Pantoum. And I do see iambic pentameter in contemporary poetry journals from time to time, in poems that are really accomplished and exceptional.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming. Sometimes, a poem that rhymes ends up with tortured language, language whose purpose is simply to rhyme and make grammatical sense—but not to reveal, illuminate, expound, complicate, or expand the poem’s possibilities.

The prevailing sentiment would be to not rhyme for the sake of rhyming.

In the formal poetry of yesteryear, every rhyming word accomplishes something essential and artistic; so, too, in the non-rhyming poetry of today. So when a poem rhymes just so that it can rhyme, the poem loses so many opportunities to push the boundaries of language, or to reveal something about the words that are rhymed. 

Of course, rhyme can also accentuate a poem’s movements, contribute to an interesting story, or even be dismantled for poetic effect. The point, again, is to rhyme with intention, whether it’s to highlight tensions and contrasts between ideas, to tell a great story in verse, or to reveal something through the poem’s own architecture.

Here’s an example of a New Formalist poem, so you can get a sense of contemporary rhythm and meter, retrieved here: 

“Sonnet On a Line From Vénus Khoury-Ghata” by Marilyn Hacker

Marilyn Hacker is a brilliant contemporary voice in formal poetry, able to write within virtually every type of form poem. What might differentiate this sonnet from classical variations of the form is its syntax: those hard stops and punctuations that occur mid-line feel distinctly modern, interrupting the flow of the language with intention. A successful poem will negotiate the tension between the sentence and the line to produce more complex meanings. And, of course, these 10- and 11-syllable lines scan beautifully, with end-rhymes that do not impede the flow of the work, but rather fit within the poem’s aesthetic whole (even when the rhymes themselves start to slant).

Learn more about forms of poetry here:

https://writers.com/what-is-form-in-poetry 

Seek Aesthetic Unity

Lastly, and briefly, a successful poem in the contemporary sense will have some form of aesthetic unity. By this, I mean that all aspects of the poem correspond to something central. There’s a gestalt that forms only when every element is present and placed intentionally in the work. 

All aspects of the poem correspond to something central.

This might look like a poem relying on the same categories of image. Conversely, a poem whose subject matter is fragmented or disjointed might also include fragmentation in its word choice and line breaks.

However the poem strives for this unity, contemporary poetry often strives for it.

Here’s a poem that has this unity of effect in action, retrieved here:

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand

Is absence an aesthetic? Certainly it is in this poem, whose negotiations with self and place move swiftly through sharp, bright line breaks. The movement of the speaker reflects the movement of this poem, whose repetitions feel like ways of filling the empty space of the speaker’s own body, of the poem’s own brevity. 

Other Contemporary Rules of Poetry

The list of dos and don’ts can be rather tedious, perhaps even nonexhaustive. Nonetheless, here’s an unfinished assemblage of guidelines I’ve been given over the years.

• Avoid lofty, abstract words like “soul”. If everyone interprets the meaning of a word in dramatically different ways, it has no useful effect in the poem. 
• Words that ring of yesteryear are best avoided. These include, but are not limited to: Oer, eterne, alas, hark, heretofore, afar, ere, forswear, forsooth, prithee, anon, nought, perchance, and aye. 
• Poems should always be written left-flush, unless there is an artistic reason for using indentation or right-flush lines, but never write an entire poem in which the line is centered on the center of the page.
• Starting a poem or an aside with “once” to tell a story from the past is convenient, but rather overdone.
• Metaphors can lend themselves to effective poetry, but a metaphor is not inherently poetic, and poetry overloaded with metaphors and similes will likely falter under the weight of comparison. 
• “Untitled” is, in fact, a title, and not a very effective one. Unless  you have intention behind “Untitled,” give your poem a more intentional title. 
• Do not write in a poem what is best expressed in prose. 
• Do not preach, proselytize, or try to be didactic in poetry. 
• Although poetry requires skill and intellect, do not write poems with the intent of being praised for your genius, or with the intent of becoming famous online. 

Against the Rules of Poetry Craft

Despite the fact that I’m a workshop organizer and educator—or, perhaps, because I am those things—I have an ambivalent relationship to these rules of poetry in the 21st century.

This isn’t to say that the rules of poetry are wrong (though there are some that I dislike), or that contemporary poetry is worse than older poetic movements (though individual poems fail to live up to my standards). I just hate prescriptivism in general; I dislike formulaic art, and I think there is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

There is a difference between writing within constraints and writing constrained poetry. The rules that ought to inform the former so often produce the latter.

It’s not that these rules are wrong. It’s that they’re rules. And it’s not that rules are always bad; it’s that, especially in art, they should not be treated with such absolute power as they’re given.

My favorite poems—the ones that challenge me, delight me, and show me new possibilities in language—break rules. They are daring, stubborn, perhaps even iconoclastic. These poems know what the rules are and know when to follow their own internal logic instead.

I like it when a poem has ungainly line breaks, or lines that are way too long for the page. I like it when a poem is a bit over-indulgent, because, really, why should the poem moderate itself? And I like it when poems are highly conceptual, or when poems begin in iambic pentameter and end unmetered, and I LOVE when a poem cannot be easily categorized.

A Poem That Breaks the Rules

I’m going to share with you now a poem that breaks some rules. You are welcome to hate it—several of my friends did—but let me at least tell you why I love it, too.

“Glove Money” by Sophia Dahlin

Retrieved from The Yale Review.

The Broken Rules of Poetry

Let me acknowledge the rules that this poem is breaking:

1. Effective line breaks and end-words—that first stanza uses some form of the word “hand” as the end-word 4 times. The second stanza has more variations on hands, palms, gloves, etc. as its end-words.
2. No Ideas But In Things—There are a few times when I feel like the speaker is interpreting images for me, like in the line “I mean when I despised my own thin / smallboned chest”.
3. Avoid redundancy—that first stanza in particular expresses the same idea in a number of ways, but the idea itself doesn’t evolve much. Nor is the amplifying effect all that significant, except maybe to highlight some sort of absurd feeling around money.
4. Seek aesthetic unity—What is with this poem’s weird diversions? First the fun fact about “cashier”, then Lance Armstrong (????), and then that third stanza, which has, on a first read, zero relationship to the first two stanzas.

It’s this last rule that, I think, is the most divisive in this poem. I run a poetry writing group and recently used this as a model poem for one of our prompts. About half of the group appreciated the poem’s zaniness; the other half said, among other things, that The Yale Review “must be going downhill.”

I, for one, love this poem. It is basically two poems in a trench coat, with that break between the second and third stanza being comically, cosmically large. The poem leaps across that break on wobbly footing, and what we end up with is a poem that, to use Dahlin’s own words, “would drive a workshop insane.”

What that giant leap did for me is make me pay really close attention to how these two seemingly unrelated sections are connected. A fun exercise you could even do is reread the poem without the first two stanzas, so that it is just “Glove Money // Once, before I knew I was a kind of / lesbian…”

What I notice, then, is a number of really interesting binaries. For example:

The poem is also, I think, linked by a fear of touch. In the first two stanzas, the speaker desires gloves because they do not want to touch money, but the speaker also mentions not wanting to touch other peoples’ hands if those hands have touched money, resulting in a kind of fear-by-proxy—that we are stained and tarnished by money, and our touch, thus, is tainted. 

But then the third stanza contains a different fear, the kind of sublime fear that informs erotic desire: to touch the object of our wanting and thus be irrevocably transformed by touching that object. (Or, by being unable to touch it.)

As for the other rules this poem breaks, I think the poem maintains its unique voice and perspective because it eschews those rules. I much prefer a poem whose voice adds texture to the contemporary canon—rather than a poem who blends in so seamlessly with contemporary aesthetics that it is, ultimately, forgettable.

Other Poems That Break the Rules of Poetry

Here are links to some other poems that, I think, break some 21st century rules of poetry—and are all the more better for them.

• “Tomorrow, No, Tomorrower” by Bradley Trumpfheller 
  • A poem that could be described as excessively sentimental. 
• “Death, Yes, Life” by Lily Greenberg
  • There’s no explicit rule that you can’t mention the craft elements of poetry within a poem itself, but I find it daring that this poem tells the reader that its images are not metaphors or symbols—a controversial act of interpreting itself to the reader.
• “Prayer” by Galway Kinnell 
  • Poems that try to be universal usually falter—it’s much easier to find the universal in the particular. But this poem’s vast, abstract appreciation for what is does, indeed, feel like a prayer. 
• “The Problem of Writing Poems in the Shape of Deciduous Trees” by Brian Bilston
  • Shape-based poems are usually kind of gauche—overly constricting language and relying on geometry to convey thought. And this one is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek pun… and yet, I’m charmed somehow. 
• “Poem” by Alice Notley
  • Poem, in general, makes for a horrible title for a poem. We know it’s a poem. We see the poem on the page. What a waste of language space! And yet… the “anonymity” of this Poem poem somehow makes Poem a fitting poem title. 

Tips For Breaking The Rules of Poetry

If you write poems that follow the rules, great! If you want to break those rules, that’s great, too. Here are a few pieces of advice:

Break the Rules of Poetry With Intention

If you laugh at a funeral, people will notice. Similarly, if you do something in a poem that goes against convention, it will draw the reader’s attention towards that broken convention. You don’t want to commit a faux pas. 

What this means is, if you plan to do something against-the-grain in a poem, it should be done with artistic intent. Disliking the rule is perfectly fine, but breaking it must come with some sort of creative purpose.

For example, if all of your lines end on weak words, don’t do it just because you hate concrete language. Do it because it contributes to the poem’s meaning. A great example of this exact broken rule is Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool”, whose weak end words signify a weakness of selfhood and identity in the poem’s hooky subjects:

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks

Follow the Logic of Your Voice

When a poem breaks a rule successfully, its success is found in the uniqueness of the poet’s own voice. 

This advice is a lot easier said than done. How do you measure voice? How do you know when to follow it, and how do you follow it? 

What “voice” is is the inimitable quality of your work, which can only be honed through your own unique relationship to language. It means avoiding cliché, figuring out your own perspective on the world, and finding the best language to transmit that perspective. These things can’t really be taught—they are honed simply through the poet’s practice—but the more you know your voice, the easier it will be to break the rules in favor of your own art. 

Read Rule Breaking Poetry 

My favorite poems are the ones that make me think, you can do that in a poem? 

The more poetry you read and encounter, the more likely you are to encounter this same reaction, and the more you will want to write poems that challenge the limits of language.

Here’s a poem I read recently that gave me the above response—I love it for its speaker-as-observer lens and its wandering, universal humanity. Retrieved here.

Everything All at Once by Oliver Baez Bendorf

Interrogate the Rules As You’re Using Them

Why does this line need to be broken on the verb? What’s wrong with using the word “soul” in this stanza? Why can’t I cry in my own poem about death? 

Oftentimes, these questions have obvious answers, but sometimes they don’t. And it’s those moments when the reason for the rule isn’t apparent that are windows into further possibility. The rules exist to help you write successful poetry, but when the poem feels more successful without the constraint of those rules, opt to break them instead. 

One Last Thing…

I really like this article from LitHub about the capital-C Craft of literature, and when to ignore Craft rules. It’s written for a fiction writing audience, but I think a lot of the notes and ideas presented here are equally applicable to poets: 

https://lithub.com/25-essential-notes-on-craft-from-matthew-salesses/

More Advice on Writing Poetry

Here are more articles, guides, and resources for writing successful poetry:

• How to Write a Poem
• What is Poetry?
• How to Start a Poem 
• Finding Poetry Inspiration
• Becoming a Poet

Break the Rules of Poetry at Writers.com 

At Writers.com, we teach the rules just as often as we break them. Take a look at our upcoming online poetry writing courses, where you’ll receive expert feedback and instruction on every poem you write.

The post The Rules of Poetry for Contemporary Poets appeared first on Writers.com.

Writing dialogue in a story requires us to step into the minds of our characters. When our characters speak, they should speak as fully developed human beings, complete with their own linguistic quirks and unique pronunciations.

This article guides you through how to write dialogue in a story. The tools here will help your characters speak with their full uniqueness and complexity, while also helping you fully inhabit the people that populate your stories.

Let’s explore how to write dialogue. 

What is Dialogue in a Story?

Dialogue refers to any direct communication from one or more characters in the text. This communication is almost always verbal—except for sci-fi telepathy, which still counts, and except for instances of inner dialogue, where the character is speaking to themselves.

Dialogue definition: Direct communication from one or more characters in the text.

Dialogue writing is essential to the art of storytelling. In real life, we learn about other people through their ideas and the words they use to express them. It is much the same for dialogue in creative writing. Knowing how to write dialogue in a story will transform your character development, your prose style, and your story as a whole.

Additionally, dialogue allows for the exchange of information, which will advance the story’s plot. Any story that involves conflict between two or more people must involve dialogue, or else the story will never reach its climax and resolution.

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Inner Dialogue Definition

Inner dialogue is a form of communication in which a character speaks with themselves. This is, essentially, a form of monologue or soliloquy. Inner dialogue allows the reader to view the character’s thoughts as they happen, transcribing their doubts, ideas, and emotions onto the page.

Inner dialogue definition: a form of communication in which a character speaks with themselves.

Inner dialogue can also be a memory or reminiscence, even if the character is not consciously speaking to themselves. If the narrator shows us a memory that the character is currently thinking about, then that character is still offering something to the narrative by means of unspoken conversation.

It is not necessary for any story to have inner dialogue. However, if you plan to use dynamic characters in your writing, then it probably makes sense to show the reader what that character’s inner world looks like. Developing complex, three dimensional characters is essential to telling a good story, which requires us to have some sort of window into those characters’ minds.

Indirect Dialogue Definition

Indirect dialogue is dialogue, summarized. It is not put in quotes or italics; rather, it neatly sums up what a character said, without going into detail.

Indirect dialogue definition: dialogue summarized.

In other words, we don’t get to see how the character said something, we are only told what they said. This is useful for when the information is better summarized than told in excruciating details, because the narrator wants to get to the important dialogue, the dialogue that introduces new information or reveals important aspects of the character’s personality.

Haruki Murakami gives us a great example in Kafka on the Shore:

How to Write Dialogue: What Successful Dialogue Accomplishes

Every story needs dialogue. Unless you’re writing highly experimental fiction, your story will have main characters, and those characters will interact with the world and its other people.

That said, there’s no “correct” way to write dialogue. It all depends on who your characters are, the decisions they make, and how they interact with one another.

Nonetheless, good dialogue writing should do the following:

Develop Your Characters

A close study in how to write dialogue is a study in characterization. Your characters reveal who they are through dialogue: by paying close attention to your characters’ word choice, you can clue your reader into their personality traits and hidden psyches.

Your characters will often reveal key aspects of their personality through dialogue.

One character who can’t stop characterizing himself is Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger’s anti-hero could be psychoanalyzed for hours. Take, for example, this excerpt from Holden’s inner dialogue:

“Grand. There’s a word I really hate. It’s a phony. I could puke every time I hear it.”

What do we learn about Holden through this line? For starters, we learn that Holden is the type of person who analyzes and scrutinizes each word – just like writers do, perhaps. We also learn that Holden hates anything positive. Always a downer, Holden despises words of praise or grandeur, thinking the whole world is irresolvably flat, boring, and monotonous. He hates grandness almost as much as he hates phoniness, and both concepts are sure to make him sick.

Holden is a character who puts his entire personality on the page, and as readers, we can’t help but understand him—no matter how much we like him or hate him.

Set the Scene

Dialogue is a great way to explore the setting of your story. When the setting is explored through dialogue writing, both the characters and the reader experience the world of the story at the same time, making the writing feel more intimate and immediate.

When the setting is explored through dialogue writing, the writing feels more intimate and immediate.

You might have your character wander through the streets of New York, as Theo does in The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Here’s an excerpt of inner dialogue:

Notice Theo’s attention to detail, and the vibrant imagery he uses to capture the city’s energy. Of course, you might set the scene more simply, as Dorothy does when she says:

In only a few words, this line of dialogue advances not only the setting but also Dorothy’s characterization. She is innocent and operating from a limited frame of reference, and the setting could not be more different from her homely Kansas background.

Both methods of scene setting help advance the world that the reader is exploring. However, don’t explore the setting exclusively through dialogue. Characters are not objective observers of their world, so some information is better explained through narration since the narrator is (often) a more reliable voice.

Advance the Plot

Dialogue doesn’t just tell us about the story and the people inside it; good dialogue writing also advances the plot. We often need dialogue to reveal important details to the protagonist, and sometimes, an emotionally tense conversation will lead to the next event in the story.

Dialogue often helps ratchet up a story’s tension. At times, dialogue will advance the plot by offering a twist or revealing sudden information. We can all agree that the following lines of dialogue advanced the plot of Star Wars:

The exchange of information is often what accelerates (0r resolves) a story’s conflict. Paying attention to word choice and the strategic revelation of information is key to using dialogue in a story.

Foreshadow

Just like in real life, your characters don’t always say what they mean. Characters can lie, hint, suggest, confuse, conceal, and deceive. But one of the most powerful uses of dialogue writing is to foreshadow future events.

In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Romeo foreshadows the death of both lovers when he exclaims to Juliet:

In saying he would rather die lovers than live in longing, Romeo unknowingly predicts what will soon happen in the play.

Foreshadowing is an important literary device that many fiction stories should utilize. Foreshadowing helps build suspense in the story, and it also underlines the important events that make your story worth reading. Don’t try to trick your readers, but definitely use foreshadowing to build meaning and complexity.

Learn more about foreshadowing here:

Foreshadowing Definition: How to Use Foreshadowing in Your Fiction

How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DOs of Dialogue Writing

We’ve talked about what dialogue writing should accomplish, but that doesn’t answer the question of how to write dialogue in a story. Let’s answer that question now—with some more dialogue writing examples in the mix.

1. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Differentiate Each Character

Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk.

Your characters’ dialogue should be like thumbprints, because no two people are alike. Each character will have their own style of speaking, and will emphasize different things when they talk. You can make each character unique by altering the following elements of dialogue style:

• Sentence length: Some people are verbose and loquacious, others terse and stoic.
• Dialogue Punctuation: Do your characters let their sentences linger… or do they ask a lot of questions? Are they really excited all the time?! Or do they interrupt themselves frequently—always remembering something they forgot to mention—struggling to put their complex thoughts into words?
• Adjectives/adverbs: Characters that are expressive and verbose tend to use a lot of adjectives and adverbs, whereas characters that are quiet or less expressive might stick to their nouns and verbs.
• Spellings and pronunciation: Do your characters omit certain vowels? Do they lisp? The way you write a line of dialogue might reveal a character’s dialect, and adding consistent quirks to a character’s speech will certainly make them more memorable.
• Repetitions and emphasis: Do your characters have any catchphrases? Do they use any words or phrases as crutches? Maybe they emphasize words periodically, or have a strange cadence as they speak. We tend to repeat certain words and phrases in our own everyday vocabularies; repetition is also a useful device for writing dialogue in a story.

You’ve already seen character differentiation from the previous quotes in this article. In this scene from The Catcher in the Rye, notice how differently Holden Caulfield speaks from the young woman he’s talking to—and just how much characterization is implied in their divergent voices:

Aside from these two characters being different from one another, Holden speak differently than characters in other works of fiction. Can you imagine Holden Caulfield being Romeo in R&J? He’d say something stupid, like “Juliet’s family are all phonies, but the funny thing is you can’t help but fall half in love with her.”

A more contemporary example comes from White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Every character in this novel is exceptionally well differentiated, even the minor characters—like Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah, who appears only briefly towards the novel’s end. Here’s an excerpt:

Pay attention to the dialogue. What do you notice? What’s odd about the way he speaks? If you don’t notice it, the novel’s narrator gives us a hint:

“No one in the hall was going to admit it, but Brother Ibrahim ad-Din Shukrallah was no great speaker, when you got down to it. Even if you overlooked his habit of using three words where one would do, of emphasizing the last word of such triplets with his see-saw Caribbean inflections, even if you ignored these as everybody tried to, he was still physically disappointing.”

For more advice on characterization, check out our article on character development.

https://writers.com/character-development-definition

2. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Consider the Context

A common mistake writers often make when writing dialogue in a story: they use the same speaking style for that character throughout the entire story.

For example, if you have a character that tends to speak in wordy, roundabout sentences, you might think that every sentence of dialogue should be wordy and roundabout.

However, your character’s dialogue needs to take context into consideration. A wordy character probably won’t be so wordy if they’re being held at gunpoint, and their words might stammer or falter when talking to a crush. Or, in the case of Jane Eyre, the context might make your statement more powerful. Jane proclaims:

As she lives in a society with strict gender roles, Jane’s statement—to a man, no less—is thrillingly bold and controversial for its time.

Your characters aren’t monotonous, they’re dynamic and fluid, so let them speak according to their surroundings.

3. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Space Out Moments of Dialogue

If your characters just had a lengthy conversation, give them a page or two before they start speaking again. Dialogue is an important part of storytelling, but equally important is narration and description.

The following excerpt from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy has a great balance of dialogue (underlined) and narration.

You can see, in the above text, that about 1/3 of the writing is dialogue. This allows the reader to see the full scene while still viewing the conversation, making this an excellent balance of narration and dialogue writing.

Simply put: balance dialogue with your narrator’s voice, or else the reader might lose their attention, or else miss out on key information.

4. How to Write Dialogue in a Story: Use Consistent Formatting

There are several different ways to format your dialogue, which we explain later in this article. For now, make sure you’re consistent with how you format your dialogue. If you choose to indent your characters’ speech, make sure every new exchange is indented. Inconsistent formatting will throw the reader out of the story, and it could also prevent your story from being published.

How to Write Dialogue in a Story: 4 DON’Ts of Dialogue Writing

Just as important as the DOs, the DON’Ts of dialogue writing are just as important to crafting an effective story. Let’s further our discussion of how to write dialogue in a story: we’ll dive into what you shouldn’t do when writing dialogue, alongside some more dialogue examples.

1. DON’T Include Every Verbal Interjection

When people talk, they don’t always talk linearly. People interrupt themselves, they change direction, they forget what they were talking about, they use pauses and “ums” and “ohs” and “ehs.” You can include a few of these verbal interjections from time to time, but don’t make your dialogue too true-to-life. Otherwise, the dialogue becomes hard to read, and the reader loses interest.

Let’s take a famous line from The Catcher in the Rye and fill it in with verbal interjections.

With interjections:

What do you think of the edited quote? The interjections make it much harder to read, much less personable, and honestly, they become kind of annoying. However, the quote with interjections is much more “true to life” than the original quote. Your characters don’t need to speak perfectly, but the dialogue needs to be enjoyable to read.

2. DON’T Overwrite Dialogue Tags

Dialogue tags are how your character expresses what they say. In the quote “‘You’re all phonies,’ Holden said,” the dialogue tag is “Holden said.”

Unique dialogue tags are fine to use on occasion. Your characters might yell, stammer, whisper, or even explode with words! However, don’t use these tags too frequently—the tag “said” is often perfectly fine. Notice how overused dialogue tags ruin the following conversation:

Sure, the conversation isn’t interesting to begin with, but the dialogue tags make this writing cringe-worthy. All of this dialogue can be described with “said” or “replied,” and many of these quotes don’t even need dialogue tags, because it’s clear who’s speaking each time.

Dialogue Tags and Adverbs

This is doubly serious when dialogue tags are combined with adverbs: adjectives that modify the verbs themselves. Our intent with these adverbs is to intensify our writing, but what results is a strong case of diminishing returns. Let’s see an example:

Yikes! If your dialogue tags start distracting the reader, then your dialogue isn’t doing enough work on its own. The reader’s focus should be on the character’s statement, not on the way they delivered that statement. If she spoke those words with contempt, show the reader this in the dialogue itself, or even in the character’s body language.

If your dialogue tags start distracting the reader, then your dialogue isn’t doing enough work on its own.

Lastly: if you’re going to use a dialogue tag other than “said,” make sure the verb you use actually corresponds to dialogue. In other words, there needs to be a speaking verb before you describe some other sort of action.

Here’s an example of what NOT to do:

The dialogue tag “said” is perfectly fine for most situations.

3. DON’T Stereotype

Everybody’s speech has a myriad of influences. Your characters’ way of speaking will be influenced by their parents, upbringing, schooling, socioeconomic status, race, gender, sexual orientation, and their own unique personality traits.

Of course, these personal backgrounds will influence your character’s dialogue. However, you shouldn’t let those traits overpower the character’s dialogue—otherwise, you’ll end up stereotyping.

Stereotyped characters are both glaringly obvious and embarrassing for the author. For example, J. K. Rowling didn’t do herself any favors by naming a character Cho Chang—both of which are Korean last names. Similarly, if all of your male characters are strong, charismatic, and loud, while all of your female characters are meek, helpless, and insecure, your writing will be both offensive and inaccurate to life.

An exception to this might be if you want your work to explore stereotypical ways of being in the world. Certainly, people in the real world conform to stereotypes—but successful writing still interrogates those stereotypes.

Nonetheless, stereotyped dialogue is bad writing. Not only does it make your characters one-dimensional, it’s also offensive to whomever your characters resemble. If you’re going to be writing your characters from a careless, surface-level take, you might reconsider whether you want to write them at all.

What to do about this? The safest way to avoid stereotyping is to write using identities that you know both personally and intimately. If your writing takes you beyond those identities, then do your research: seek out, and truly work to internalize, a diverse array of input from people whose identities resemble those you’d like to write about.

4. DON’T Get Discouraged

For some writers, dialogue is the hardest part about writing fiction. It’s much easier to describe a character than to get in the character’s head, transcribing their thoughts into language.

If you feel like your characters aren’t saying the right things, or if the dialogue feels tricky to master, don’t get discouraged. Dialogue writing is difficult!

The following devices and exercises will help you master the art of writing dialogue in a story.

9 Devices for Writing Dialogue in a Story

An important consideration for your characters is giving them distinct speech patterns. In real life, everyone talks differently; in fiction it’s much the same. The following devices will help you learn how to write dialogue in a story, as they offer ways to make your characters unique, compelling, and conversational.

Note: don’t try to use all nine of these devices for one character. Your dialogue should flow and feel consistent with the way people speak in real life, but if you overload your character’s speech with idioms, colloquialisms, proverbs, slang, and jargon, they won’t speak like anyone in the real world.

Use these devices as quirks for your characters. You can even use colloquialisms and vernacular to establish the setting, or use jargon to assign your character their occupation and social standing. Be wise, be strategic, and keep an ear for how people sound in real life.

Now, here’s how to write dialogue using 9 specific devices.

1. Colloquialism

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that’s specific to a language, geographical region, and/or historical period. Mostly used in informal speech, colloquialisms will rarely show up in the boardroom or the courtroom, but they pop up all the time in casual conversation.

A colloquialism is a word or phrase that’s specific to a language, geographical region, and/or historical period.

We often use colloquialisms without realizing it. Take, for example, the shopping cart. Someone in the U.S. Northeast might call it a “cart,” while someone in the South might call it a “buggy.”

In fact, colloquialisms abound in the history of the English language. When it rains but the sun is out, a native Floridian might call it a sunshower. A Wisconsinite will call a water fountain a “bubbler.” In the 1950s, a small child might have been called an “ankle-biter.” Nowadays, a New Yorker might describe cold weather as being “brick outside.” (Yes, brick.)

Colloquialisms help define a character’s geographic background and historical time period. They also help signify when the character feels comfortable and informal, versus when they are speaking in an uncomfortable or professional situation.

2. Vernacular

Vernacular refers to language that is simple and commonplace. When a character’s speech is unadorned and everyday, they are speaking in vernacular, using words that can be understood by every person in that character’s time period. (A colloquialism is often an example of vernacular.) For dialogue in a story, your characters will likely use vernacular, unless they try to avoid it at all costs.

Vernacular refers to language that is simple and commonplace.

The opposite of vernacular would be dialect, which is speech that is tailored to a specific setting, and is therefore not commonplace or universally understood. An example of vernacular is contrasted with dialect below.

3. Dialect

A dialect is a type of speech reserved for a particular time period, geographical location, social class, group of people, or other specific setting. It is language that the entire population might not comprehend, as it uses words, phrases, and grammatical decisions that aren’t universally understood.

Here’s an example of modern day vernacular. The same sentence has been rewritten as though it were spoken by someone with a Southern dialect.

An English speaker who doesn’t hail from the American South may be tripped up by “fixing” and “slaw,” as those terms aren’t universally understood.

Do note: the words “coleslaw” and “soft drink” can also be considered dialects of other regions in the United States. However, these words will likely be understood across the nation.

4. Slang

A slang is a word or phrase that is not part of conventional language usage, but which is still used in everyday speech. Generally, younger generations coin slang words, as well as queer communities and communities of color. (Some of the terms below started in AAVE, or African American Vernacular English.) Those words then become dictionary entries when the word has circulated long enough in popular usage. Slang is a form of colloquialism, as well as a form of dialect, because slang terms are not universally understood and are often associated with a specific age group in a specific region.

Some recent examples of slang words and phrases include:

• No cap—“no lie.”
• Boots—this is a sort of grammatical intensifier, placed after the thing being intensified. “I’m hungry, boots” is basically the same as “I’m so hungry.”
• Bop—a catchy or irresistible song.
• Drip—a particularly fashionable or interesting style of clothes.
• It’s sending me—“that’s hilarious.”
• Periodt—a more “final” use of the word “period” when a salient point has been made.
• Snatched—used when someone’s fashion is impeccable. In the case of someone’s waist size, snatched refers to an hourglass figure.
• Pressed—“stressed” or “annoyed.”
• Slaps—“exceptionally good.”
• Stan—stan is a portmanteau of “stalker fan,” but really what it means is that you enjoy something intensely or obsessively. You “stan” a song or a movie, for example.
• Werk—a term to describe something done exceedingly well. If you’re dancing tremendously, I might just yell “werk!”
• Wig—when something shocks, excites, or moves you, just say “wig.”

5. Jargon

Jargon is a word or phrase that is specific to a profession or industry. Usually, a jargon word intentionally obfuscates the meaning of what it represents, as the word is meant to be understood solely by people within a certain profession.

Jargon is a word or phrase that is specific to a profession or industry.

Often, people let jargon slip from their tongues without realizing the word is inaccessible. For example, a doctor might tell their friend they have rhinitis, rather than a seasonal allergy. Or, someone well-versed in mid-century diner lingo might ask for “Adam and Eve on a raft” rather than “two poached eggs on toast.”

When it comes to dialogue in a story, the occasional use of jargon can help characterize someone through their profession. However, too much jargon usage will start to sound comical and inane, as most people don’t speak in jargon all the time.

6. Idiom

An idiom is a phrase that is specifically understood by speakers of a certain language, and which has a figurative meaning that differs from its literal one. Idioms are incredibly hard to translate, because the meaning conveyed by the idiom does not appear within the words themselves.

An idiom is a phrase that is specifically understood by speakers of a certain language, and which has a figurative meaning that differs from its literal one.

For example, a common idiom in the United States is to say someone is “under the weather” when they’re feeling ill. No part of the phrase “under the weather” conveys a sense of sickness; at most, it might communicate that that person feels pushed down by the weather. But then, what weather? Could they be under “good” weather, too? These are questions that someone who doesn’t speak English natively will likely ask.

So, the literal meaning of “under the weather” is different from the figurative meaning, which is “ill.” Some other idioms in the English language include:

• Pulling your leg—just having fun with someone or messing with them.
• Bat a thousand—to be successful 100% of the time.
• The last straw—the final incident before something (usually negative) occurs.
• Big fish in a little sea—someone is famous or hugely successful, but in a very small corner of the world.
• Eat your heart out—be envious of something.

An idiom can also reveal regionality, as some idioms are only spoken in certain dialects. For example, when it rains while the sun is shining, a common idiom in the South is that “the devil is beating his wife.” This phrase is understood in other parts of the U.S. and might have its roots in folklore, but it is primarily spoken by people in the American South.

7. Euphemism

A euphemism is the substitution of one word for another, more innocuous word. We often use euphemisms in place of words and phrases that are sexual, uncomfortable, or otherwise taboo.

A euphemism is the substitution of one word for another, more innocuous word.

For example, when someone dies, you might hear their family member say “they kicked the bucket.” Or, if someone were unemployed but didn’t want to say it, they might say they are “between jobs” or “searching for better opportunities.”

Euphemisms present something psychologically interesting to a person’s dialogue. We often use language to mask that which upsets us most but which we are unwilling to confront or communicate. A euphemism for death is intended to mask the pain of death; a euphemism about unemployment is intended to mask the shame of unemployment.

We might also use euphemisms to hide information from people we don’t trust. Let’s say you’re in an intimate relationship, and don’t want the person you’re conversing with to know about it. You might pull out your knowledge of Middle English and say you’re “giving a girl a green gown.” Or, you might simply say you’re rolling in the hay with someone, to communicate your relationship while also communicating you don’t want to talk about it.

Note: even “intimate relationship” is a bit of a euphemism!

The opposite of a euphemism is a dysphemism—the use of a more violent word or phrase than necessary. 

In dialogue writing, use euphemisms as hints to your characters’ psyches. In speech, what is omitted often says more than what is included.

In dialogue writing, use euphemisms as hints to your characters’ psyches.

8. Proverb

A proverb is a short, oft-repeated saying that bears a wise and powerful message. Proverbs are often based on common sense advice, but they use metaphors and symbols to convey that advice, prompting the listener to place themselves in the world of the proverb.

A proverb is a short, oft-repeated saying that bears a wise and powerful message.

For example, a common English proverb is “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” This means that it’s better to take away modest gains than to sacrifice those gains for something that may be unobtainable. Sacrificing the bird in your hand for two birds which may be impossible to own is a risky endeavor.

When it comes to writing dialogue in a story, proverbs educate both the protagonist and the audience. A proverb will often be spoken by an elder or someone with relevant experience to help guide the protagonist. The story’s events might also be a reaction to that proverb, either fulfilling or complicating it. Finally, a proverb might characterize the speaker themselves, cluing the reader into the speaker’s beliefs. Not all stories have proverbs, but stories with wise characters often do.

9. Neologism

A neologism is a coined word that describes something new. Some neologisms are coined by authors themselves—Shakespeare, for example, coined over 2,000 words, many of which we use today. “Baseless,” “footfall,” and “murkiest” come from The Tempest, just one of Shakespeare’s many plays and poems.

A neologism is a coined word that describes something new.

Nowadays, most neologisms describe advancements in technology, medicine, and society. “Doomscrolling,” for example, describes the act of consuming large quantities of negative news, often to the detriment of one’s mental health. The word was likely invented in 2018, due in part to the increased access to information that technology gives us.

Other modern day neologisms include:

• Google (as a verb: to google something)
• Crowdsourcing
• Noob
• Staycation
• Webinar
• Vlogging
• Malware
• Podcast
• Ghosting

Some neologisms are portmanteaus, which is a word made from two other words combined in both sound and meaning. For example, “smog” is a portmanteau of “smoke and fog,” and it’s a neologism only relevant to the Industrial Revolution and beyond.

Neologisms are not to be confused with grandiloquent words, which are invented words used for the sole purpose of sounding intelligent (and which have become enduring facets of modern English).

In dialogue writing, neologisms primarily help situate the reader in the story’s temporal setting. No one would use the word malware in the year 1920. Additionally, words like “crowdsourcing” are far more likely to be used by younger generations, and they signify a certain sense of tech savviness and modernity that not everyone has.

Finally, neologisms are fun! You might even invent some new words in your own writing, though a neologism should be elegant and relevant, without drawing too much attention to itself.

How to Write Dialogue: Exercises

Of course, the best way to learn how to write dialogue in a story is to practice it yourself. Below are some dialogue writing exercises to try in your fiction.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Write out a character’s “personal vocabulary.”

All of us have a personal vocabulary, meaning that we tend to choose the same set of words to describe something, even though our vocabularies are much larger. For example, I have a tendency to use the word “scandalous” when describing something. I often use it ironically or as a compliment, which is a trait of word-usage associated with Millennials and older Gen Z kids. This word is a part of my personal vocabulary, and though I don’t say it constantly, I often use it when I can’t think of a better word.

Your characters are the same way! Writing out a personal vocabulary for your characters might jumpstart your dialogue writing, and it also gives you something to fall back on in your dialogue while still providing depth and character.

Coming back—once again—to Holden Caulfield, his personal vocabulary might include words like: phony, prostitute, goddam, miserable, lousy, jerk. These words and phrases are rare overall, but they’re exceedingly common in his own personal way of verbalizing his experience of the world.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Consider different settings.

Sometimes, you just need to generate dialogue until you come across the right line or turn-of-phrase. One way to do that is to write what your character would say in different situations.

On a separate document or piece of paper, write what would happen if your character was talking to different people or talking in different situations. For example, your character might:

• Talk to a grocery store clerk
• Be a hostage in a bank robbery
• Take the SAT
• Run into their crush
• Get pulled over for speeding

Explore what your character would say in each of these (and other) different scenarios, and you might just trick your brain into writing the next sentence of your story.

Dialogue Writing Exercise: Pretend you are your character.

Instead of writing your character in different settings, be your character in different settings. Think about what your character would think while you’re doing the laundry, driving to work, or paying the bills. This habit will help you approach this character’s dialogue, as you develop the ability to turn their personality on in your brain, like a switch!

(Hopefully, you’re never caught in a bank robbery. If you are, maybe your character can save you.)

How to Write Dialogue: Formatting Tips

We’ve covered how to write dialogue in a story, but not how to format dialogue. Dialogue formatting is a relatively minor concern for fiction writers, but it’s still important to format correctly. Otherwise, you’ll waste hours of your writing time trying to fix formatting errors, and you might prevent your stories from finding publication.

There are a few different ways to format dialogue; for each of these examples, we will reformat the sentence “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” said Chief Brody.

Most writers and publishers use standard quotation marks at the beginning and end of the dialogue.

A comma always separates the dialogue from the speaker. In this case, the comma goes inside of the quotation marks. Periods, semicolons, and em dashes also go inside the quotation marks. If you’re writing in British English, some conventions place the dialogue punctuation outside of the quotation, but both ways are acceptable.

Another way some people format their dialogue is by italicizing instead of using quotation marks.

In this instance, you would fit the comma within the italicized text, as you would any other punctuation in the dialogue. Only the quote is italicized; the speaker remains unitalicized. The drawback of this formatting is that your dialogue might be confused with the character’s inner dialogue, which should also be italicized.

Finally, your dialogue formatting can eschew the use of quotation marks and italics. In this case, you would indent any part of the text that is dialogue, and leave narration un-indented.

This way of formatting makes it easier to write without worrying about punctuation marks, but be warned that most publishers will change that formatting before publication.

If your sentence starts with the dialogue tag, put a comma before the quotation mark. Do capitalize the first letter inside the quotation marks, as this is, grammatically, the start of a sentence.

And, if your dialogue spans multiple paragraphs, do not use the end-quote until the very end of the dialogue, but start each paragraph with a new start-quote.

Learn How to Write Dialogue at Writers.com

Great dialogue is the true test of whether you understand your characters or not. However, developing this skill takes a lot of time and practice. If you’re looking for more advice on how to write dialogue in a story, check out our online fiction writing courses for dialogue writing tips from the best instructors on the net!

The post How to Write Dialogue in a Story appeared first on Writers.com.

Do not mistake brevity for simplicity: a successful piece of flash nonfiction still incorporates complexity and insight into its small size. If you’d like to learn more about this genre, or learn how to write flash nonfiction, read on to discover this exciting form of CNF.

What is Flash Nonfiction?

Flash nonfiction is a work of creative nonfiction that, typically, is written in 1,000 words or fewer. This word limit mirrors the limits of flash fiction, which are fictional stories told in under 1,000 words. 

Flash nonfiction is a work of creative nonfiction that, typically, is written in 1,000 words or fewer.

Alternate terms for this genre include “micro-memoir,” “flash memoir,” “flash creative nonfiction,” or “micro-essay.” Sometimes, “micro” genres are even smaller than flash—a maximum of 100 or 200 words, for example—but they bucket under this category of concise truth-telling.

Of course, what makes a flash nonfiction piece successful is not only its brevity. In order to tell a complete story about your own life, you will need to rely on the craft tools of poetry and flash fiction. 

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Common Craft Elements of Flash Nonfiction

When reading or writing flash nonfiction, you are likely to come across the following elements and craft decisions:

1. Concise Word Choice
2. Imagery
3. Theme
4. Experimentation and Hybridity

Concise Word Choice

With few words to tell a complete story, flash nonfiction writers must push language past its limits. This means allowing words to convey multiplicities, complexities, and nuances, as well as letting images also be metaphors or symbols.

In other words, flash nonfiction often straddles the borders of poetry. When working with the constraints of such a low word count, works of flash, both nonfiction and fiction, sometimes read more like prose poetry. 

Imagery

Successful literature often operates through striking images. The need for this grows when working within the flash genre, as flash nonfiction writers rely on imagery to convey essential experiences, metaphors, and symbols. 

This doesn’t have to be a visual image—imagery as a literary device includes touch, smell, sight, taste, and even things like motion or internal sensation. A resonant work of flash nonfiction will leave the reader with an image or feeling that they digest long after the story ends. 

Theme

Of course, all works of literature have a theme. But flash nonfiction must approach its theme in as few words as possible, and thus elevate important ideas so that every aspect of the work points towards them. 

This is opposed to works of prose that prioritizes, say, the story’s plot or characters. Flash nonfiction has those elements, of course, but it must waste no words getting to the heart of things: the feelings and energies—thematic elements—that give the story its reason for existing. 

Experimentation and Hybridity

Works of flash nonfiction are more likely to experiment with form and structure. Much like in poetry, flash nonfiction’s reliance on concision requires the work to take creative approaches in the telling of true stories. Form and structure offer writers more ways to layer their ideas and structure their thoughts outside of the conventions of standard prose. 

A piece of flash nonfiction might also be a hermit crab essay, for example, which borrows its shape from other types of text. Or it might engage with the experimentation of lyric essays or incorporate poetry into the work. Whatever the experiment, successful flash essays discover their own form and language to tell the story that needs telling. 

Examples of Flash Nonfiction

Let’s look now at some examples of flash nonfiction to see these principles in action.

“Mary Ruefle Drives Me to the Dentist” by Kelly Luce

Read it here, in Craft Literary.

This quirky flash nonfiction piece is also an example of speculative nonfiction, in which nonreal, imagined, or speculative elements intertwine with the author’s lived experiences. 

It doesn’t actually matter whether or not Kelly Luce was driven to the dentist by the poet Mary Ruefle—though it’s likely that this is just a conversation that happened in Luce’s head. Ruefle’s zany, vivacious presence in the story allows Luce to access the unanswerable questions in her own life, magnifying a mundane car ride into something exploratory. 

At times, the prose teeters on the poetic, arriving at epiphany through its wit and concision. Ruefle’s poetry and imagined presence reminds Luce, as well as us readers, to always be moved by beauty. 

“Sanguine” by Molly Akin

Read it here, in Brevity. 

This is a great example of how flash forms push the shape of language to speak in such small spaces. Here, Akin interrogates language itself to understand and convey the painful nature of miscarriage. 

This hybrid, braided essay interweaves the author’s own experiences with definitions and etymologies. If anything, I find those definitions to be the most painful, salient moments of the work: it defines the author’s own pain without directly naming it. 

You can also see the craft tools of poetry in action: concision, internal line breaks, evolution in form, and a tension propelled by word play. 

“Childhood Cranes” by Andrew Bertaina

Read it here, in In Short. 

You can tell this piece was written by a poet, and not just because it references the poetic craft in the first line. Each image offered in this gorgeous prose cuts closer and closer to the professor’s emotional core, painting a kind of portrait-by-proxy, painted through periphery.

There’s an idea in the craft of poetry called the initiating and generated subject. Essentially, the idea that gets you into the poem is not where the poem ends, nor is it what the poem is really “about.” Successful poetry discovers something and takes a leap. 

I feel this is happening here. The professor telling the class about cranes and imagery is just a doorway into what this piece discovers about childhood, nostalgia, memory, change. 

“Point of View” by Lina Herman

Read it here, in Craft Literary.

This flash nonfiction piece has a kind of metanarrative: there’s the story, and then there’s the author commenting on the craft of the story as it progresses. 

It’s an interesting experiment. On the one hand, the author risks interpreting herself for the reader, rather than letting the work be open to interpretation. On the other hand, the metacommentary is a way of inserting the author’s thoughts into the work in a way that feels more genuine. What would a writer do to change the story as it happens in real life? What would it be like to press pause, step outside of one’s self, and reframe the narrative? 

That the story’s subject matter would be so intense as to fracture the author’s sense of narrative is enough to make this experiment pay off. We see the story’s lens move, evolve, catch up with the author’s experiences; the pain, distorted, becomes much more deeply felt. 

How to Write Flash Nonfiction

Here are some tips on how to write flash nonfiction. 

1. Omit Needless Words

It goes without saying that flash nonfiction can’t have wasted words. Really, no good work of writing wastes words. But in flash, the magnitude of concision increases greatly, and words need to have layered, complex meanings to convey a full story in such small space. 

It is akin to a circus performer folding themselves into a box: their body is interwoven and nonlinear, as are the words in a flash piece. Here are some tips for omitting needless words:

• Target common filler words.
  • Adverbs can often be replaced with better verbs (Does the road “run curvily”, or can the road simply “curve”?). 
  • Prepositions can sometimes be rerouted or removed (Do you have “a lot of money” or do you “contain riches”? Are you “with child” or “pregnant”?).
  • Punctuation, particularly semicolons and em-dashes, can sometimes replace conjunctions and connective words—while texturing your prose. (Note—I originally wrote “making your prose more textured”; turning the adjective “textured” into a verb “texturing” was more efficient.) 
• Let images represent themselves.
  • It’s tempting to interpret an image for the reader, or to explain an image with a lot of description, metaphor, etc. However, letting images exist on their own without interpreting them for the reader allows the reader to interpret the images themselves, giving the writing room for thematic complexity. 
  • For example, it’s wordy to say “The countryside felt lonely, with so few people around, and I was aware of how sublime and beautiful nature is.” Besides the fact that the idea is a bit cliché, it chews the reader’s food for them; it conveys no experience.
  • A concise way of writing the above idea comes from Kelly Luce’s flash nonfiction piece: “People live out there. Horses stare. Big boulders rest beside barns like ancient pets.”
• Watch out for needless repetitions.
  • A free gift is simply a gift; the hot summer sun is merely the summer sun.

For more advice on concision, check out our article on omitting needless words:

https://writers.com/concise-writing

2. Let Structure Lend Its Voice

Another way that flash nonfiction exercises concision is by letting the story’s structure create layers of meaning. 

The above flash nonfiction examples showcase how structure is wielded within story. Akin’s “Sanguine” interweaves etymology with personal experience to tell the full story of miscarriage and convey an embodied pain that, otherwise, cannot be easily conveyed. Through a discordant, braided structure, the story comes to resemble, perhaps, the author’s own body after undergoing such trauma.

Conversely, Herman’s “Point of View” incorporates point of view into the story structure itself, creating two stories: the actual event of the piece, and the author’s running commentary as she tries to understand a fundamentally heartbreaking situation. These alternating narratives combine to give the story, again, a sense of discordance, mirroring what the author’s own experience of the event might have been like. 

These are ideas that lose their power if they are merely described in the work itself. Akin gains nothing by telling us her miscarriage was difficult; she gains everything by transmitting an embodied experience through her inquiries of language. Herman gains nothing by telling us she didn’t know how to deal with her daughter’s thoughts of death; she gains everything by interweaving the story’s event with her own struggle to understand. 

3. Experiment With Perspective

Successful works of flash nonfiction often convey experience through some nonlinear mode of storytelling. 

By linear, I mean the convention that a story is one event after the next, told by a single, easily identifiable narrator, who tells us that A led to B led to C. 

Narrative is the story we tell ourselves about what happened, and the truth is not always linear. Notice how, in the flash nonfiction examples we’ve shared, the authors’ relationships to time are nonlinear: the narrators look forwards and backwards, sometimes at the same time. They speak from moving cars and classrooms, from dictionaries and park benches. 

Think about the best place to tell your story from. From what point of view? With what voice? Exploring what elements of time? These questions can lead to exciting, daring works of micro-memoir that convey more precisely our strange relationships to our lived experiences. 

4. Read Flash Nonfiction Regularly

The best way to write successful flash nonfiction is to also read it. The following journals routinely publish great works of creative nonfiction, including flash and micro pieces. 

Where to Read (and Publish) Flash Nonfiction

Here are some great literary journals to read flash nonfiction—and submit your own work to when you’re ready.

• CRAFT Literary
• In Short
• Brevity
• Hippocampus Magazine
• Smokelong Quarterly
• River Teeth

Write Your Best Flash Nonfiction at Writers.com!

The creative and flash nonfiction courses at Writers.com will help you write your most daring and original stories. Check out our upcoming online creative nonfiction courses, where you’ll receive expert feedback and teaching on every essay you submit. 

The post Flash Nonfiction: The Craft of Tiny Truths appeared first on Writers.com.

Writing Resources for Crafting Good Writing

How do you write well at the level of syntax, grammar, and basic writing craft? These writing resources help you with the mechanics of effective prose. 

Writing Resources for Grammar and Mechanics

These writing websites help you learn the basics:

• Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips—A blog and podcast dedicated to the quirks of the English language, plus advice for writers of all stripes.
• AutoCrit—A writing platform with both free and paid software options that helps writers write error-free, stylish prose.
• OWL at Purdue—A great resource that goes over every single mechanic of effective prose writing. 
• Grammar Monster—A site with lessons and games to help you lock down the mechanics of good writing. 
• Syntaxis—Grammar quizzes to ensure you’ve mastered the quirks of the English language.
• Common Errors in English Usage—A database of common errors, hosted at Washington State University. 

Writing Resources for Vocabulary

Want to expand or test your vocabulary? These writing websites help you find the right word or learn a new one.

• Tip of My Tongue—for when that word you’re trying to think of is, well, “on the tip of your tongue.”
• OneLook—Helps you find the word you’re looking for by first describing the concept. 
• Online Etymology Dictionary—teaches you the known histories of English-language words and how they evolved to become what they are today. 
• Free Rice lets you test your vocabulary on 5 different levels. It’s great for English-language learners as well as native speakers who want to test their knowledge of words like “passipied” and “pandiculate.” For every answer you get right, the site donates 10 grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme. 

Writing Resources for Style

Think deeply about your writing style with these helpful resources:

• Word Frequency Counter—paste any text here, and it will tell you the frequency that every word is used in the text. Great for if you feel your writing is getting redundant or repetitive. 
• This summary of Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook “style scale” (great for speculative writers!). 
• Our article on Writing Styles. 
• “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” by Garielle Lutz—A craft essay that thinks deeply about words, sentences, and our relationships to them. 
• Our masterlist of 116 common literary devices.
•  Literarydevices.net, which offers more literary devices examples and tools for you to practice with. 

Websites for Classic and Contemporary Poetry and Literature

Great writers are great readers. Here’s where to read classical literature and find out what’s happening in the contemporary writing world. 

Classical Literature

• Project Gutenberg—A library of literature that all exists in the public domain. Completely free. 
• Cornell University’s Digital Library—Another great collection of historical literary ebooks. 
• This public Google Drive filled with PDFs of literary theory, criticism, and analysis from both past and contemporary thinkers. 
• American Verse Project—A digital library of American poetry books and verse collections pre-1920. 
• Luminarium—If you can get past the hard-to-read fonts, this website features a lot of English-language poetry from Medieval and Renaissance times.
• Poet’s Corner—Another digital repository, and possibly the oldest online. 

Contemporary Literature

• UPenn’s Electronic Poetry Center—A huge collection of texts and examinations on innovation in poetry. 
• Ubuweb—An audiovisual collection of experimental, concrete, and visual poetry. 
• LitHub—Essays and craft analyses about contemporary literature and events.
• Book Riot—A book blogging website all about contemporary events in literature. 
• The Marginalian—The brain child of Maria Popova and a vast intertextual repository of philosophy, literature, and science. 
• Poets House—Also a school, a library, and a community center in New York, Poets House is often at the forefront of contemporary poetry. 

Writing Resources to Help You Focus

If you find your attention is everywhere except your word document, these resources can help you get words on the page. 

Writing Softwares

• Write, Or Else—Admittedly, this is a stressful writing resource, but it might work for you. The idea is that you set a timer and keep the words flowing on the page, otherwise the page yells at you. You can also set it on hard mode, wherein the text editor starts deleting your writing… unless you keep typing. 
• Written? Kitten!—A kinder version of “Write, Or Else”, this site shows you a new photo of a kitten for every X amount of words you write. Positive reinforcement!

Noise Cancellation

Useful websites for when there’s too much sound around you. 

• Rainy Mood—If rain gets you in the spirit of writing, this white noise generator is great for you. 
• Coffitivity—If the sound of a busy coffee shop helps you focus, but there’s no cafe nearby, this site might help you focus. 
• Rainy Cafe—And, if you like both the sound of rain and of coffee shops, why not both? 

Word Processors for Creative Writers

Looking for something other than Microsoft Word and Google Docs? These softwares and products will meet your unique writing needs.

Free Software

• Open Office—A great replacement for Microsoft Word, Open Office is a free suite of open source software that provides similar tools and functions.  
• LibreOffice—Another Microsoft Office Suite alternative. 

Paid Software

• Scrivener—Novelists and bookwriters will especially love this word processor that has all the bells and whistles you can think of. Keep track of ideas, plan characters, plot things granularly, organize your work, and, of course, write the bestseller waiting inside of you. 
• Final Draft—Screenwriters looking to write perfectly formatted scripts would do well to write them in Final Draft, which includes a number of easy-to-use features that formats while you write, so that you can just focus on the writing. 
• OmmWriter—A word processor focused on focus, OmmWriter offers distraction-free structure so that you can write and create in your best digital environment. 

Writing Websites for Research

The internet is often too big to trawl. While your local library often has the resources you need, these websites also help you find the information you’re looking for. 

Broad-based Search Engines

Google is the dominating search engine, and it’s so strong that other search engines often exist unnoticed. However, savvy writers would do well to know the different engines that exist, as many of them will yield results that otherwise remain hidden. 

• Searchmysite—a great search engine for the “indie web”, with results that privilege personal sites and “digital gardens” rather than sponsored content. Great for digging up websites oriented around personal experience—a must-have for fiction writers. 
  • Other similar sites include Indieweb, Blogarama, and this big list. 
• Marginalia Search—Another great search engine that focuses on non-commercial content. 
• World Cat—Kind of like a meta-library site, this search engine connects you to library resources around the world. Great for academic or literary research, as well as books, maps, articles, sound recordings, theses, and content that might otherwise be paywalled. 
• RefSeek—An search engine with over a billion academic resources, including encyclopedias, magazines, monographies, etc. 
• BASE—An index of academic journals and publications, about 60% of which is Open Access. 
• EBSCOHost—Another massive database. Your local library might have a free subscription for you. 
• JSTOR—Short for Journal Storage, JSTOR has research on any topic you can think of. Also may be free to access through your local library. 

Search Engines on Niche Topics

For queries on more granular topics, consider these site:

• Writer’s Search Engine—A database of articles on literature and writing craft. 
• SpringerLink—A search engine focused on scientific research and documentation.  
• Science.gov—a database of scientific research specifically from U.S. labs and scientific sites. 
• RePec—Publications on economics and related sciences. 

Wikipedia also has this fantastic list of specific search engines that can hopefully meet your niche research needs.

Other Research Resources

• Social Security Administration—A database of popular baby names from 1879-Present. Especially useful for writers of American historical fiction. 
• Finding Data on the Internet—An amalgam of useful tips for finding information online. Especially useful for journalists and digital researchers. 

Fiction Writing Resources

These writing resources are specific to writers of short stories, novels, screenplays, and other forms of fiction.

• E. A. Deverell’s free worksheets for every aspect of the fiction writing process. 
• The Storyteller’s Roadmap—Free guides through the process of planning, writing, and revising stories. 
• Story Structure Database—Especially useful for screenwriters, this website deconstructs the plot structures of books and movies so you can see how it’s done and construct new stories yourself. 
• Relatedly, TVTropes is a fantastic database of plot and character tropes throughout every genre of fiction. 
• MIT’s List of Primary Personality Traits—Useful if you’re working through the basics of character development. 
• This guide on writing realistic injuries, in case your characters ever get injured. 

Poetry Writing Resources

These websites make the craft of successful poetry that much easier. 

• Poemancer—By poets, for poets, the website features prompts and guides through writing inspired poetry. 
• RhymeZone—Great for poets writing rhyming and formal poetry. 
• Poets.org—A huge repository of poetry, including daily poems in your inbox and ways to connect more deeply to poetry. 
• The Paris Review—In addition to being a literary journal, The Paris Review has an interview series that lets you hear from contemporary poets and writers about their approach to the craft. 
• Poetry Foundation—Also a literary journal and nonprofit advocacy group for poetry in American life, Poetry Foundation has a “Learning Prompts” section that prompts new poetry and learning all at once. 

Publishing Resources

Want to put your work out into the world? These sites help you do just that. 

Publishing in Literary Journals

• Our guides on the best literary journals for poetry and on how to submit to literary journals. 
• Chill Subs—A huge database of contemporary literary journals, with useful queries and search terms to help find the best homes for your work. 
• Duotrope—A site built on user-reported data that offers insights into a literary journal’s publishing opportunities, selectiveness, and guidelines.
• Submittable—A submission manager that also lets you search for upcoming deadlines and publishing opportunities.
• New Pages—A classifieds site for publishing opportunities. 
• Authors Publish—A magazine that routinely announces new submission opportunities and literary journals. 

Traditional Book Publishing and Finding Literary Agents

• QueryTracker—A directory and website for finding and tracking your submissions to literary agents. 
• The Directory of Literary Agents—An annual guide to the state of contemporary U.S. publishing. 
• Agent Query—Another database of agents, searchable by genre. 
• Our guide to how to publish a poetry book. 

Self-Publishing

• Our guides on self-publishing on Amazon and 5 tips for self-publishing your book. 
• This in-depth guide on the self-publishing process.
• PRESStinely—A boutique service that partners with writers to help them self-publish and self-promote their books. 

Creative Writing Websites for Prompts and Inspiration

If the blank page won’t stop staring at you, these websites for writers and poets will help you find and explore new ideas. 

• Creativity Portal—A library of creative writing prompts. 
• Language is a Virus—An automatic prompt generator, hosted at a site with a ton of great writing exercises and games. 
• Reedsy—Each week, Reedsy puts out a set of 5 prompts that writers can submit short stories (1,000-3,000 words) to. Winners receive $250!
• NYC Midnight—A platform that puts out different creative writing contests. Writers are tasked with writing stories or scripts of different lengths in an assigned genre. If you make it to the final round, you’re eligible for big cash prizes!
• Writing Exercises—A repository of prompts, exercises, and articles to help you write what you need to write. Check out their generators, including a first line generator and character generator to get you writing randomly and creatively. 
• Seventh Sanctum—A website that hosts 150 different random generators. 
• Poets & Writers—A magazine and collection of writing resources, including this prompts section for writers of all genres. 

Creative Writing Websites for Classes and Further Education

We break down the best (non-degree-conferring) creative writing schools at our article here on creative writing programs. Of course, we’re biased in thinking that Writers.com is the best place to learn the craft. 

Additionally, we think these websites have great blogs, newsletters, and opportunities for learning more about writing:

• The UK-based National Centre for Writing’s Writing Hub. 
• DIY MFA. 
• Janice Hardy’s Fiction University blog. 
• Yale’s free self-directed course on Modern Poetry.

Miscellaneous Writing Resources

These writing websites are harder to categorize but are nonetheless helpful to know about.

• Copyscape—A great tool for checking if your work has been plagiarized online. 
• BetaBooks—A service that lets you keep track of how Beta Readers read, respond to, and interact with your work. 
• Pacemaker—A free service that helps you set a writing goal and keep track of it. 
• Our article on the best gifts for writers. 

Find More Writing Resources at Writers.com

Want more support for your writing? Take a look at our online creative writing courses, join our writing community, or read our writing tips section for more advice on the writer’s life. 

The post 90+ Writing Websites and Resources for Writers of All Stripes appeared first on Writers.com.

Throughout human history, stories have offered us a way to make meaning from complicated experiences. In the field of psychology, writing therapy is seen as any form of emotional disclosure through writing which allows a person to investigate their thoughts and feelings. If you keep a journal, then you’re already tapping into this technique.

Over the years, I’ve found that talking with someone I trust, whether a friend or professional, can help me manage stress and move toward greater alignment. It’s both a kind of unburdening and validation of my lived experience. When I share my thoughts in a supportive space, I give voice to values, air emotions, and build new understanding. Writing offers the same sense of clarity through personal narrative, only it doesn’t require an external party—I can both deliver and receive the message.

 I wonder how many of us are drawn to write for this very reason: to glimpse an honest reflection of our human experience staring back at us, and to be changed by it.

There is something distinct about writing that talking doesn’t facilitate—time and space to process, less finality, low risk, flow states. Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentomihalyi describes flow states as a space of suspended self-consciousness, temporarily allowing us to step outside ourselves enough to gain perspective. The result is that “the self that the person reflects upon is not the same self that existed before the flow experience: it is now enriched by new skills and fresh achievements.” I wonder how many of us are drawn to write for this very reason: to glimpse an honest reflection of our human experience staring back at us, and to be changed by it. Writing our personal narratives is a conversation that brings us closer to a part of ourselves that longs to be seen.

There is tremendous therapeutic value in sharing your thoughts and inner experiences through writing. By communicating our inner experiences, we allow our personal narratives to be witnessed and affirmed. Our burdens become lighter, and we become more open to possibility. In short, writing therapy provides relief and hope with little more than a pen and paper.

“The construction and development of the self is a blend of both the storyteller and the stories told.” – Dr Daniel Tomasulo

• What is writing therapy?
• How does writing therapy help you heal?
• Why creative writing classes are a great space to write therapeutically
• Writing therapy prompts
• Writing therapy may change the trajectory of your life
• References & Further Readings on Writing Therapy

What is writing therapy?

Writing therapy is seen as any form of emotional disclosure through writing which allows a person to investigate their thoughts and feelings.

A clinical version of writing therapy, called expressive writing, emerged from the research of Dr. James Pennebaker in the late 1980’s. His research showed that expressive writing helped strengthen the immune system, improve mental and physical health, and reduce chronic pain. Among the many benefits, it can also help us make meaning from our lived experiences, particularly when they were upsetting, confusing, or traumatic.

The purpose of expressive writing is to share feelings, attitudes, and opinions; thus, it is more about the value of the process and not the final outcome. It may feel a little wild, but that’s because the emotional landscape is a kind of wilderness in and of itself. The felt experience of expressive writing is not unlike wandering down an unknown forest path only to get lost, narrowly elude a predator, find strength in your ability to persevere, and emerge a wiser, more cohesive self.

Pennebaker’s original work on expressive writing focused on healing trauma, but more recent studies on writing therapy speak to its potential as a positive intervention to promote psychological well-being. For instance, many recovering artists may already be quite practiced with writing therapy in the form of Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. For those unfamiliar, Morning Pages serve as a type of morning meditative practice entered through stream-of-consciousness writing. The purpose of morning pages is to clear psychic burdens, thereby allowing the space for creative processes to flow more freely. If it sounds like expressive writing, that’s because it is—just applied toward creative recovery.

Whichever variation you choose to work with, writing therapy is a powerful method that allows you to tell your own version of the story, and the way you choose to relate to the events outside of your control. It has a profound impact on your confidence to move forward, your ability to persist in the face of difficult circumstances, and how you nourish yourself through life.

 “Story is far older than the art of science and psychology, and will always be the elder in the equation no matter how much time passes.” – Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés

How does writing therapy help you heal?

A surprising finding in Pennebaker’s research was that people who kept their traumas to themselves seemed to have worse health outcomes than those who confided in someone. It turns out that not talking about important life issues poses a risk to physical health and science can prove it: the act of writing about emotional topics has a relaxing effect on the body, lowering blood pressure and heart rate almost immediately.

A word of caution is in order. In the short term, writing about traumatic events can intensify painful feelings, so it’s best to reserve some time afterwards to reflect and take care of yourself. Pennebaker recommends not writing about anything you don’t feel ready to reflect on; for instance, a traumatic event that happened very recently and which may feel too raw or disorganized. Despite the pain that comes from confronting difficult emotions, it’s worth sticking with it. Long term effects of expressive writing include reduced depressive symptoms, rumination, general anxiety, and enhance a person’s social life.

Article continues below…

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However, expressive writing doesn’t have to be all about revisiting past traumas. It is also considered a “flourishing” practice in some contexts, helping to develop resilience and increase overall happiness. In my coaching work, I frequently use this type of narrative construction with my clients, guiding them to reflect on their strengths and past success so we can build momentum—we acknowledge the pain of being stuck, but we keep an eye toward what comes after.

Writing therapy provides relief and hope with little more than a pen and paper.

Through the lens of positive psychology, writing therapy can promote greater degrees of health and happiness. Martin Seligman, widely considered the founder of positive psychology, found that autobiographical narratives such as writing out gratitude, times when you were at your best, and acknowledging good things in life to be evidence-based interventions to promote happiness. When we write using exercises designed to build self-efficacy, this can help us gather resources and skills to move forward with greater confidence and intention.

To be honest, it is hard to find anything that expressive writing can’t do in terms of improving our emotional health and well-being. It strikes me that one of the most wondrous benefits of writing and storytelling is their ability to affect a person such that they are more self-aware, understanding, and open-minded—all practices that develop empathy.

“The arts, in some sense, do “teach us to love” and to live—beyond simply offering a way to “purge” our most distressing emotions.” – Megan Hayes, PhD 

Why creative writing classes are a great space to write therapeutically

While we use expressive writing to be honest with ourselves first and foremost, it can help to have the support of a trusted community to hold you through any process of growth or healing. Writing alongside your peers, in an inclusive, value-aligned space isn’t necessarily about making the therapeutic practice more effective—you don’t need to share what you wrote about to experience the healing benefits of writing—but community can serve as a container for support and self-care.

Research shows that clients in group coaching programs consistently report greater success in working toward their goals, in part because of the shared learning, sense of belonging, and emotional support. Some forms of expressive writing may resurface painful experiences, inevitably causing us physiological stress. Fortunately, humans are wired to relate and regulate together—we find our center just being in the presence of others who are grounded. When we have people who can participate in and witness our experiences, we are more resilient, feel less isolated, and build community through shared story.

If you’re looking for the space to build community and share your stories, be sure to check out the online creative writing courses at Writers.com. 

Writing therapy prompts

If you’re curious to get started, a first step may be to set an intention around what you want to get out of writing therapy. Is it to find new meaning after emotional upheaval and distress? Are you feeling stuck and unmotivated? Or, perhaps you are seeking to cultivate happiness and a life that centers your values.

As for a procedure, Pennebaker suggests writing 15-20 minutes a day, continuously without regard to spelling or grammar. Don’t write to impress anyone. You can even burn it if you like—the point of this exercise is for your benefit only.

Here are a few prompts to get you started:

• Morning pages: As soon as you wake up in the morning, hand write stream-of-consciousness style until three pages are filled. You can write what you’re thinking about, feeling, hearing, or noticing. Track your thoughts and feelings as they occur.
• Creative block: Write about a time in the past when you experienced a block around your writing. How were you feeling at the time? What about your past experience is similar to your block now? What do you think is keeping you from getting started?
• Emotional experience: Pick something that has deeply influenced your life that you feel ready and safe to write about. You can write about the event itself or explore how it affected you—what you felt then, and how you feel about it now.
• Finding Forgiveness: Recall a situation where you were not treated well by someone. How did you feel before, during, and after the event? How might that person have felt and why? What do you think was going on in their life during the event? If you feel as if you can forgive them, write out what you would say to them.
• Monster Story: Write a story about a person who was overly critical or made you feel down about your creative talents in some way. Be specific about the event, what they did or said, and how it made you feel at the time.
• Self-Sabotage: What are three self-destructive habits that keep you from nurturing your best self as a writer/friend/parent and cause shame or guilt? Write about these habits and how they make you feel. How might they be sabotaging your dreams and aspirations for yourself?
• Chronic Contemplation: Write about something you desire to be different but hesitate when it comes to taking action. How is keeping this situation the same negatively affecting you? What might be the benefits of changing? How would it feel to shift this pattern?
• Creative Champion: Write a letter to a person who championed your creativity, perhaps a teacher, friend, or parent. Explain how their actions made you feel at the time and how they continue to have an impact on your creativity to this day.
• Childhood Room: Describe your room from when you were a child. What did you love most about it? What do you love most about your current room? How did it make you feel, and how might you recreate that in your current environment?
• New Origin Story: Rewrite a narrative from a time where you faced struggle. Focus on lessons you learned and strengths you gained through the experience of adversity.
• Obituary: Write a life summary through the eyes of a grandchild or student. What stands out to you? Is there anything that you would like to do differently?
• Values Exploration: Write about a time when you felt like you were living in alignment, with a strong sense of purpose and meaning. What were you doing? Who were you with? What values were you living in this experience that you want to center in your life now?
• Three Good Things: For each day of the week, write about three good things that happened. Expand on why these good things happened. How can you have more of them in the future?
• Wiser Self: Imagine you are your older, wiser self. What did you do in mid-life that you’re proud of or that you enjoyed? Be as specific as possible. What would your wise, older self like to tell you now? What dreams might they encourage you to pursue? Write a letter to yourself as your older, wiser self.
• Younger Self: Remember yourself at eight years old. Describe what you liked to do, and what your favorite things were. What would your eight-year-old self tell you now? Write a letter from you at eight to you at your current age.

Here are several tips to harness the most benefit from expressive writing:

• Name emotions. Give space for positive and negative feelings about your experience.
• Find new meaning. Start to reconstruct your reality by building a cohesive story.
• Shift perspective. Can you view your experience through another person’s eyes?
• Be open and honest. This writing should reflect who you really are, not seek to impress.
• Don’t over-analyze and get stuck. Keep moving forward by asking “What’s next?”

Writing therapy may change the trajectory of your life

A final word of warning about the power of expressive writing: you may never be able to go back to being the person you were before. Through my own expressive writing practice, and with the support of a coach, I took an honest look at my experience of burnout and what was holding me back—my shame, self-doubt, fears about releasing an old identity. I found that confronting these painful emotions freed up new energy for me to invest toward a more authentic vision of who I wanted to be. Something more congruent began to take shape. Eventually, I walked away from a depleting, misaligned situation to embark on a whole new way of living and working. Now I am a business owner and burnout recovery and resilience coach at Gentle Roots Wellness. I turned my tragedy into a whole new trajectory—don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I found that confronting these painful emotions freed up new energy for me to invest toward a more authentic vision of who I wanted to be.

As you begin or enhance your own exploration in writing therapy, remember that it’s not about the product, it’s the process. It’s not your writing ability, attention to grammar, or whether you write by hand or type on a computer that makes this practice effective. Write in any language and style that you like—it won’t matter. If you feel like something is too intense to write about, then leave it for another day. You don’t have to share what you write with anyone you don’t trust—you probably shouldn’t share it with people you don’t trust to accept the real you. According to Pennebaker there’s no single best way to “write about or to get past an emotional upheaval.” His advice, if any, is to “Stick with what works and drop what doesn’t. Above all, trust your own intuition to recognize whether you are going in the right direction.”

References & Further Readings on Writing Therapy

• Cameron, J. (1992). The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Perigee.
• Hayes, M. (2017). The flourishing writer. Writing in Practice, 3. https://doi.org/10.62959/WIP-03-2017-12
• Pennebaker, J. W. (2004). Writing to heal: A guided journal for recovering from trauma and emotional upheaval. New Harbinger Publications.
• Tomasulo, D. J., & Pawelski, J. O. (2012). Happily ever after: The use of stories to promote positive interventions. Psychology, 3(12A), 1189–1195. https://doi.org/10.4236/psych.2012.312A176

Kaylyn Kirkpatrick is a burnout recovery and resilience coach based in northern Colorado, though part of her heart still belongs to Oregon. A highly sensitive, empathic Autist, she finds joy in deep conversations, making ritual out of a cup of tea, and talking with plants. Her path has been anything but linear: mother, scientist, researcher, teacher, coach, and always, a writer. She holds degrees in Biochemistry and Food Science, and too many certificates to count (including a Diploma in Brewing from the UK which is, in fact, a real professional qualification). For nearly a decade, she designed and led educational programs for Cornell University and a national nonprofit. Through her work at Gentle Roots Wellness, Kaylyn supports creative, neurodivergent, and highly sensitive people in getting unstuck, building confidence, and cultivating balance. She is passionate about trauma-informed care and fostering safer spaces for growth, healing, and connection. She is currently co-writing a memoir with the radiant human who adopted her biological son, publishing weekly newsletters at Growing In The Space Between, and facilitating online workshops.

The post Writing Therapy: How Language Helps Us Heal appeared first on Writers.com.

And structure is only part of it. A picture book for children also has to speak directly to the young reader. It has to spark their imagination, draw them in from the very first page, and hold their attention with a story that feels relatable. It has to keep them turning the pages and reward them with an ending that feels both satisfying and surprising. That balance—between craft and connection—is what makes writing a picture book such a joyful challenge. 

This guide breaks down how to write a children’s picture book—and more broadly, how to write a picture book that connects from the very first page. I’ve written and edited more than eighty children’s books, including picture books for Disney, Nickelodeon, and Sesame Street, and I’ve coached dozens of authors through the process. What I’ve learned is that picture books aren’t built on formulas. They grow out of a handful of essentials—guidelines that matter no matter what kind of story you’re trying to tell. 

In this article are five essentials that can guide you through how to create a picture book, whether it’s your first time or you’re a seasoned author. I also go over how to publish a picture book. But first, what is a picture book? 

What is a picture book?

A picture book is usually written for children ages three to seven. Standard picture books are generally 24 or 32 pages, generally designed to be read aloud while the child studies the pictures. 

Standard picture books are generally 24 or 32 pages, generally designed to be read aloud while the child studies the pictures. 

 

And as for the role of pictures? Maurice Sendak once explained it this way: a picture book is “an ingenious juxtaposition of picture and word, a counterpoint… Words are left out — but the picture says it. Pictures are left out — but the word says it.” Sometimes the words tell one story while the illustrations tell another. That interplay is what makes the form shine. It deepens the experience and makes children want to re-read the book again and again. 

To work, a picture book also needs a child or childlike protagonist who has agency. The main character should make discoveries, take risks, and figure things out for themselves. Adults can be present, but they shouldn’t step in to rescue them or deliver the moral. 

And when you reach the ending, it should feel both surprising and inevitable. The reader should think, Of course that’s what happened—yet I never saw it coming. That’s the kind of ending that keeps kids flipping the pages and returning to the story.

To work, a picture book also needs a child or childlike protagonist who has agency.

5 essential craft tips on how to write a picture book

1. How to write a children’s picture book starts with knowing your zero draft and your why

When I begin a coaching or editing session, I always start with two questions. First: can you tell me your story in your own words, from beginning to end? That becomes what I call the zero draft—a rough but essential sketch of the story. 

Second: what was your inspiration for writing this book? What do you hope the reader feels when they finish—comfort, laughter, recognition, curiosity? That’s your “why,” and it becomes the heartbeat of the story.

The zero draft shows where you’re headed. The why keeps you on track to create the feeling you want to leave with the reader.

Armed with both of those answers, you have both a compass and an anchor. The zero draft shows where you’re headed. The why keeps you on track to create the feeling you want to leave with the reader. Together, they prevent you from losing sight of the story’s purpose as you revise.

2. To learn how to write a children’s picture book, read and lean on mentor texts

If you want to learn how to write a children’s picture book, start by reading picture books—especially those published in the last three years. Keep a stack on your desk. Flip through them before you sit down to write. 

I call these comps: your competition, your comparisons, and your companions on the bookshelf. They don’t have to share your subject matter. They can echo your tone, your pacing, or the kind of experience you want your story to give a reader. 

The books you remember from childhood may be beautiful, but they don’t necessarily reflect today’s market. Mentor texts train your ear and your eye. Studying mentor texts is the fastest way to internalize how to write a picture book with strong pacing as they balance brevity, rhythm, and page turns, and they inspire new approaches you might not have considered.

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3. Be brief and be bold with your edits

Picture books thrive on brevity. Most published manuscripts are under 800 words, and many are closer to 500. On the page, that means about 40 words or fewer, often just a line or two. Anything more can drag the pacing down and can hurt the read-aloud-ability of your story. These word limits are a practical guide for anyone learning how to create a picture book that reads aloud beautifully.

Most published manuscripts are under 800 words, and many are closer to 500.

But editing with brevity in mind doesn’t mean you have to strip away the heart of your story. Every word simply must earn its place. To do this, try storyboarding your draft. Think about how suspense builds across the page turns. Children experience the drama of “what happens next” most powerfully in the moment that they flip the page. 

My favorite piece of editing advice comes from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 book Terre des Hommes: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Picture books especially reward that kind of boldness. Reduce your draft in the editing stage like it’s a fine stock set to simmer, boiling off all the excess water until all that remains is a rich, delicious broth that delights the senses.4. Give your main character agency

Agency is one of the most important principles I stress in picture book writing. And by “agency”, I mean that a reader will relate best to a main character who takes action. They want a protagonist who makes choices, faces consequences, fails, gets up again, and finds a solution. 

A reader will relate best to a main character who takes action

Early in my career, I submitted five picture book manuscripts to an agent who was kind enough to give me a piece of feedback that would change my writing forever. “Your main characters aren’t main characters,” he said. They were all being guided, rescued, or explained to by adults. 

Once I rewrote with agency in mind, everything changed. My characters started driving the story instead of sitting on the sidelines. Agency matters because children – and all readers, really – naturally imagine themselves in the story. They want to feel capable, curious, and resourceful right alongside the character. A protagonist who takes action helps the reader build empathy and confidence at the same time.

Children – and all readers, really – naturally imagine themselves in the story. They want to feel capable, curious, and resourceful right alongside the character.

5. Thinking of writing in rhyme? Think again

If you are first learning how to write a children’s picture book, rhyme can be very tempting literary device. It’s musical, playful, and familiar. But it’s also demanding. Every beat has to land. Every syllable has to fall in the right place. Forced rhyme, clunky rhythm, or near rhyme that almost works will pull the reader right out of the story. 

Before you commit, ask yourself if the story truly needs rhyme. If it does, then every word deserves close attention. Read it aloud. Tap your leg as you go. If you stumble, if the rhythm feels forced, if the emphasis doesn’t fall naturally, it’s not ready. 

I often encourage authors to try a prose version alongside their rhyming draft. Lyrical prose can give you the music you’re craving without the constraints. When rhyme works, it adds delight. When it doesn’t, it distracts. Children may not have the vocabulary to explain why the rhythm feels off, but they’ll feel it instinctively, especially when an adult reader stumbles over rhymes that don’t quite work aloud. 

That’s why rhyme deserves your full commitment… or your willingness to let it go.

How to publish a picture book

Once your manuscript is polished, the next question is how to publish a picture book. There are several paths, and it’s worth knowing the differences. 

Traditional publishing

Traditional publishing is the most competitive and the slowest. Finding an agent can take months or even years. If your manuscript is acquired, it may still be a year or two before it appears in print. But the benefits are significant: professional editing, wide distribution, and sometimes an advance on royalties. Small presses in particular are often more open to new voices and worth seeking out. 

Hybrid publishing

Hybrid publishing falls in the middle. You pay for services like editing, design, and distribution. Some hybrid publishers are excellent partners; others make promises they don’t deliver on. A red flag: if someone offers you a contract based on your idea without reading your manuscript, step back. It’s never that easy. My advice: do your research, read reviews, talk to other authors. And if a publisher offers a free call, take it. Ask who owns the rights, how distribution works, and what kind of marketing support they actually provide.

If someone offers you a contract based on your idea without reading your manuscript, step back. It’s never that easy.

Indie publishing

Independent publishing partners are another option. In this model, you own all the rights and bring in support where you need it—editing, illustration, design, or distribution—while keeping full control. It’s a service relationship, not a rights-sharing one, which means you have a partner but remain the publisher of record. 

Self-publishing

DIY self-publishing is the most hands-on. You buy your ISBN, hire your own team, and upload through platforms like Amazon KDP or IngramSpark. Done well, it can be professional and rewarding. Done hastily, it can look amateurish. The responsibility is all yours, but so are the risks and the rewards. 

Choosing a publishing path comes down to alignment. Think about your goals, your budget, and how much support you want through the process. When you understand the trade-offs, you can move forward with clarity and confidence.

Learn how to write a children’s picture book at Writers.com

All of this comes back to one truth: picture books matter. They are windows into the world and doors into the minds of children. They soothe fears, prepare kids for new experiences, spark imagination, invite silliness, and build empathy. They also create lifelong readers.

Learning how to write a children’s picture book—and, broadly, how to write a picture book—means keeping a handful of essentials in mind: respect the form, give your protagonist agency, think carefully about rhyme, and choose the publishing path that fits your goals. Above all, keep your young reader at the center of your decisions. 

And remember—the ending matters most of all. A picture book that closes in a way that is both surprising and inevitable is one a child will want to hear again and again. 

If you’d like to go deeper, my asynchronous course with Writers.com will walk you through the process of writing a children’s picture book step by step. Writing a picture book is one of the most joyful and meaningful creative challenges you can take on—and with the right mindset, it’s one you can absolutely succeed at.

Cara J. Stevens is an author, editor, podcaster and book coach. She has written more than 80 books for young readers based on video games, pop-culture trends, and beloved characters including Pokémon Go, Terraria, and Minecraft and the K-pop groups BTS and BlackPink. Through her weekly column and companion podcast, The Picture Perfect Podcast, she guides aspiring writers on their journey to authorship, helping them develop their craft, find their voice, and share their stories with the world. A native New Yorker, Cara lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two grown-ish children and a loud, fluffy dog named Oliver.

The post How to Write a Children’s Picture Book appeared first on Writers.com.