midweek links- stronger writing

Ok I'm trapped in revision hell, something I'll write about more next week.

Be better today than you were yesterday. Every draft should be stronger, every novel should be better than the last.

But how, it's so hhhhhhaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrdddddd(that's what she said)

Here's a few down and dirty ways to be a stronger writer and write that break out novel.
I'm stealing most of these from Amparo Ortiz.

Sarah Davies on her blog posted 6 elements to have in your break out book.

An Inspired Concept

Larger than life characters

High Stakes

A deeply felt out theme

Vivid Setting

The mystery ingredient


Good stuff over there.

Here's some great stuff about the drafting process, here's a hint, if you ever on the fence about cutting something and you think, "But wait!" CUT IT. It's fluff.

Veronica Roth did a great post on this, go check it out.

Grammar girl has a useful article about writing clear sentences. Because remember you aren't writing a story, you're writing sentences.

Lots of times I do a seek and destroy... I mean a find and replace for useless and empty words. But I don't replace them, I go through every example and chose if each word stays. Its tedious and time consuming and boring as all hell, but I've been doing this for four days and I've cut at least 1000 unless, meaningless words.

here is the best MS word trick I've learned. You know how writing a sentence like, "he was walking to the store" makes you the worse writer in the world, because the sentence should be he WALKED to the store. Was and a ing verb is apparently horrible writing and MUST BE CUT.
In all seriousness why use two words when one will do. So here's a KICK ASS way of using MS Word and the find and replace feature.