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Six Ways Twitter Can Make You A Better Writer
Many people consider Twitter solely for networking purposes, for meeting people with common interests and conversing. And while that’s a big part of it, Twitter can also be a very useful tool for improving your writing. When I first started building my Twitter follow list, I started with a lot of writers. And soon I discovered, mostly through feeds of people like Jay Lake and Paul Jessup, the #wip hashtag. Easy enough, WIP stands for “work in progress”. Basically, writers sample little 140 character or less sections from their work, sharing it with their friends and followers. Not every writer does this (either some don’t like the attention it brings, while…
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Thoughts from a #dumbwriter
For every thing I learn about publishing, writing, and editing, there are about a dozen others that I’ve yet to figure out. No, I’m not an imbecile. (Though I sometimes walk into walls, I owe it mostly to my roving imagination and general lack of coordination.) I’m just a #dumbwriter. Over the last few years, I’ve been doing my best to get a full, bird’s eye view of Writing and How to Get Published in This Day and Age, but there are still instances where I just miss entire chunks of the geography. Those black holes on my map are where the #dumbwriter lives. Sometimes, it’s because I can be,…
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Crowded house: writing a party
Nah, not the kind with ale and food and wenches, though that happens from time to time. More like a party of people. At the moment I’m struggling with some of my chapters, as there are just too many damned people there all the time. Up until this point most of what I’ve written has been fairly straight-forward, with a handful of people doing fairly straight-forward things. Two, maybe three people in conversation, nice tight little story arcs… It was particularly comfortable in The Aldersgate because, well, every chapter was a new point of view, and helped me keep things neat and in a row. Now, in Peter of Windbourne,…
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Textual nightmares: or, some ways you can not suck at editing by learning from my mistakes
Writing novels is not my problem. My output has only improved in the last few years, and I’ve finally moved beyond the whining about not having time, or making every excuse in the world not to write stage. Those were big hurdles for me, and I’m proud of the accomplishment. I generally make my 1K goal every day, with a few exceptions, and I love telling the stories. So what’s the problem, right? Unfortunately, what’s resulted is lots of first drafts, and not completed novels. As a writer who fumbles around in the dark putting pieces together, this is truly problematic as editing, the next step in the process, just…
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Six of these, half a dozen of the other – a character conundrum
I am making every effort to write and/or edit every single day, whether it’s a work in progress or something past the first draft. It’s part of the whole, “I’m going to act like this is a professional gig” approach I’ve been instating over the last few months (to surprising success, I should add). However, I’m having a really hard time shaking the last batch of characters for any new set. It’s almost amusing, but since it’s coming in the way of a current editing project I’m trying to do (preparing Queen of None beyond the first draft) it’s bordering on plain irritating. It’s quite literally a fact of characters…
