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.

Midweek links- characters

Characters are the people animals or objects that stuff happens to in your book. Yep sorry I just stated the obvious.

(Note this mid week links might be pretty short since I'm doing it while I'm on vacation and because as soon as I get back I have a two day long meeting I need to do)

Donald Maas in Fire in your Fiction has the first section of his book dedicated to characters, a protagonist verses a hero. A hero has MUCH higher stakes. And he has great chapter on secondary characters, go check it out.

YA highway has a few good links about characters.
The bad boy-- why we love them oh so much
Parents in YA-- why can't anyone have a happy family?
5 protags in YA- The 5 big ones.
Character description---- THIS ONE IS AWESOME and exactly what I needed, who cares about anyone else.

Mary Kole asks What Makes a Character?

Querytraker.net Blog gives a GREAT character interview sheet. If you don't know what these are, it helps the writer dive in deeper in the character's mind and get to know them better. It also gets it all out on paper which you can use as a resource later. This is on my to do list before I start my next set of revisions.

Another interview sheet comes here, from writer's digest.

Here's a great one that Lynda uses (I got it from her blog yesterday)


Oh Mr Bradford, what wisdom do you have for us this week? Do you control your characters or do they control you... A great question when it comes to writing.

Words of wisdom from me-- well there's really words from Meghan but stolen by me.
Be kind to your characters, they are people too, imaginary people, but people none the less. You've created a world in your novel and you've got to populate it with SOMETHING. Don't just kill off a character because you're in a bad mood. It's not fair to you, the characters or your readers.


I'm sort of running low on ideas. What would you like next weeks midweek links to be about?
Let me know in the comments.

Midweek Links- Revising

Write is SUPER fun, isn't it? You get to create new worlds, play with new friends, be a god a for hours a day. It's so awesome.

Revising sucks.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, revising sucks.

I opted to do this week's set of links of revising because in a one week I will start revising my novel No System At All for the 12 time. 12 drafts. Something along the way went horribly wrong. But it's just not there yet. I feel like draft 11 was rocking at an 80% and hopefully draft 12 will be at 95%- draft 12 is what I plan on sending to Kathleen Ortiz since my hubby won a charity auction of a FULL MS critique. Since I wanted to get the most out of our money, I wanted to send her the BEST draft I had. Which means= REVISIONS.

BTW I should say this, please don't send an agent a first draft or even a second draft. Seriously I've worked very hard for three years now on No System At All and it makes writers look bad when some newbie sends out a first draft. Writing means rewriting.
Reading = Easy and Fun
Writing= Work.


Now there are different elements to revisions - there's big picture stuff, like major plot holes and character problems, and not enough conflict.
Then there is editing. Editing sucks too.

This week I'll focus on BIG picture stuff, then do editing and running everything through a fine tooth comb.

Over at the Disobedient writer, there's a few good steps on how to improve a first draft.

Getting started on Revising:

It's a crappy and emotions processes, querytracker.net blog tells you how to avoid the black hole. They also have a great post on how to write the second draft.

Natalie Whipple has an awesome blog and in case you haven't checked it out, SHAME ON YOU! She has several posts about revising. Revision Reference Stages of revision and while she's also an artist, she does a great visual representation of revising her own art but I think it's a great metaphor for the writing revision process as well.


I just discovered this blog last week and it's quickly becoming one of my favorites.
The Blue Lipstick Samurai <--freaking awesome name, wrote up a few revision tool kit. There's also this great post about "how 2 write good." It's great for a giggle.



Writer's Digest has a good article on the 8 blunders of writing, double check you manuscript, did you do any of these?

Another site recently discovered and I"m really digging is Sarah Enni. What I like about this post is that it's a need MS Word trick that if you haven't been doing, you should be. It tells your reading level for your writing. That's a neat little tool to have in your toolbox.


What would a mid week link be without Mary Kole? She has a BUNCH of entries on her blog about revision. Here are a few, Tip on Revision When to cut something out of your manuscript and how to write an action sequence


Next week I'll focus on editing-- the nitty gritty and painfully boring stuff.
Over the summer Mid Week Links will include information on:
Characters
Pacing
Tension
Dialogue
And whatever else I can think of.

What do you think? What should I put up?

Midweek links-Synopsis

Synopsis = sucknopsis.

For those of you who don't know Synopsis suck, hence the name sucknopsis. A Synopsis is a one to two page summary of your book. That's not a big deal, right? you wrote the book, you should know what's it's about? Right.

Um no.

How do you condense a 70,000 word book into 1 page?

Leave out the details.

Tell, don't show <--which goes against EVERYTHING you know as a write.

Main plot points only.

Focus on the main character.

Sounds simple enough, but here's the thing, no one goes into writing to write a summary. No, we write because we like word play, we like characters, we like dialogue or exploring new ideas or rich worlds that are completely unlike our own. In other words we write because we like to be creative.

A synopsis is boring, its like REAL work... worse yet it's like a homework or a book report.

Why does it need to get done? Because some agents require it, how else are they going to know what happens in your book if you don't tell them.

So below are a few links on how write a sucknopsis.

Enjoy:


At Guide to Literary Agent blog, Chuck Sambuchino gives an example of a great synopsis for possibly one of the greatest movies in the past 20 years, Eternal Sunshine in a Spotless Mind. What's nice about this is that the movie is very confusing story and yet makes complete sense. It would be a nightmare to write a synopsis for it, but Chuck does an excellent job of it. And he includes some links at the bottom of his page.

He also give a few step by step example of how to write it here.

Querytracker.net Blog is always a good resource on how to write in general. Here's one on how to make your synopsis ROCK and who doesn't like a little rock.


YA Highway has a great article about the dreaded synopsis and I'm pretty sure this is where I stole to term Sucknopsis.

Because a mid week link session would be complete without it, here's Nathan Bradford's take on a synopsis.

Lots of the sights repeat the same information, again and again.
And it all comes down to practice.

Yes, it's skill and drill. Yes, its homework. But of the query process is like the final test, then having a great synopsis is like having a great study guide.

Midweek links- Queries.

Queries.

Ok, here's the deal, you spend at between six months to five years writing a book.
And you want to get it published. How do you do that?
GET AN AGENT. How do you get an Agent?
Due to weird ass formatting issues you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the page,
to watch a cool video about it.



Ok, queries have a very specific format, three paragraph, one bio paragraph.

Here's a great example of what not to do, over at GotYA.

Sadly, I've known writers who have made most of these mistakes.
Don't ever send your form query out to 100 agents and wonder why you got rejected.

Here's another important fact-
ONCE YOU QUERY AN AGENT YOU CAN NOT QUERY THEM FOR THE SAME PROJECT.
No matter how much you change your query letter.
You get ONE shot with an agent, don't screw it up by spelling their name wrong.

Format of a query letter:

Nathan Bradford is pretty much the best resource out there for this topic.
Here is a fill in a blank format

Here is an example of a good query on Nathan's blog.
NOTE: he is representing the book as well.

Formatting the query.

Publishing Cred. What to list and what not to list.

See told you Nathan was a good resource.

Mary Kole talks about What to Query here.

I asked Mary Kole a few months ago when was the best time to query, see her response here.

Examples of Queries and why they are rejected by Janet Reed can be found here.
I will give you a warning, Janet's comments are harsh and if you are having a "woo is me, I totally suck and I should give up writing and breathing" sort of day, avoid this website.

Kathleen Ortiz gives you Query Etiquette and Part 2 is here.
She recently had a query with a 11,000 KB attachment!
It blocked up her e-mail for hours. Not cool.

HUGE TIP: Research the agent, what they like and what they don't like.
Here are a few places where you can learn all about agents.

agent query

Query Tracker.net

For YA and Children's books this is a great resource.

Reflection:
Query letters are hard, yucky and tedious.
There's lots of way to screw up on it.
So if you spent years of your life working on a novel, why not spent some time on your query letter and make sure it's perfect.

My first book I sent out 24 queries, I got 5 requests for content.
I was rejected because the novel sucked.
But I wrote a pretty awesome query letter and I learned a lot from it.

There's TONS of resources out there, but that was a small sampling that I found to be useful.


Well Maureen Johnson does a pretty good job of explaining the process here,
and since she's a published author she knows what she's talking about.

The weakest link, on the weakest day.

Contest pimping and pitching.

First off, how do you like the new format? Cid thanks for your help and Alicia sorry for snipering it.

I'm going to start the doing a thing where in the middle of the week I'm going to post links to blogs I found to be useful, because as Alicia pointed out, Friday everyone's doing it, (because Friday is the most logical day.)


Contest Pimping

http://leaguewriters.blogspot.com/2010/05/introducing-league-of-extraordinary.html

League of extraordinary writers is a blog for people who love the most scary screwed up future the writers can think of. It's called a dystopia. Lots of pretty amazing YA books (young adults for those who are not in the know) feature a dystopian society, the most famous being The Giver.

The blog just started and they're having a contest, FREE STUFF. Go check it out.


Pitching
In exactly 10 days I will be going to a writers conference. My last writers conference was possible the worst day of my life, more about this to come at a later date.

Insanely I signed up for a three minute pitch session. *shakes my head in shame because clearly I didn't learn from last time*

So I am going to include some links on how to pitch a book to an agent, because I need a refresher.

As far as I can tell, pitching a book is like a verbal query letter, but you can see the agent's face as their eyes glaze over in boredom or shine with excitement.

Rachelle Gardner talk here about why it's so important. Basically it comes doing to being able to read body language.
After 9 years of being a teacher, you would think I'd be an expert at it... NOPE, if I have an idea I'm going to steamroll through you until I've said it, no matter how uncomfortable you are during the process.

She then goes on to say what to do during a pitch, like STEP by STEP DIRECTIONS. Pretty much the most useful and awesome thing ever. Her final advice was that agents are people too. Yes they are people but they are people with POWER, they can validate five years worth of work or they can make you cry. <-- that's my addition not hers. I should say EVERY agent I've ever encountered has been very kind and extremely helpful. Still they're kinda scary.

Over at QueryTracker.net Elana Johnson talked to Laura Rennert who gave 5 steps to a great pitch. Serious five steps and a five minute timer will give a perfect pitch. Guess what I'll be doing over the long weekend?

Just for some good measure some conference to do and NEVER EVER do's.

Agent and blogger superstar Nathan Bradford talks about the one sentence pitch and the one paragraph, and two paragraph pitch.
He's so dreamy.

Mary Kole talks about Pitchcraft and she did it MONTHS ago because she's a trendsetter. She will also be at the conference I'm attending and I pray to God I don't puke on her shoes. Maybe I should bring an extra pair of shoes for her, just in case.

Kathleen Teman talks about the one sentence pitch here and since she's running the NJ SCBWI conference I'm going to, it's some solid advice.

Ok there's you go TONS of links.

Any thoughts on what to do next week?