Writing Wednesday: Great Day for Writing Tips

I opened up Google Reader this morning and was hit by a lot of great articles on writing. I guess yesterday was the day everyone needed to share good tips.

It happens to be Writing Wednesday so I will comment on some of the better ones I ran across:

CRITIQUING

Over at DON'T PET ME I'M WRITING Tawna talks about the benefits of critiquing other peoples work. This is something I'm a firm believer in.

I agree with her on all her points and would like to add one:

Sometimes it is fun to watch.

The best cure for the writing bug, and the most expensive, is to become an English Major. I'm not making that up, by the time your Junior Year rolls around and you've been studying all the great literature that has been produced over the last 2000 years you're convinced that your writing is horrible. To make it worse you try to put everything you've learned in the last 3 years into a 1,000 word story. During Jr. Year most of the people I went to school with did what I did and searched their rooms both at college and at home and destroyed every scrap of writing they had ever written because they were ashamed to let anyone see it.

When you critique someone's rough draft you get to see another diamond (hopefully) in the rough. You can see all the awkward phrases, the telling when they should be showing, Weird POV shifts and everything else. After you help them with that, you get to see the story with a little polish and watch someone else make their story into something you would pay for.

Seeing that happen to someone else gives you the confidence to rework your own story.

WHO WAS THAT MAIN CHARACTER?

Over at QUERY TRACKER Jane Lebak offers a very simple piece of advice, name your protagonist.

I have to admit to doing a facepalm after reading this. I've made this mistake a few times, one time it added to the story, I'M THAT GUY, but that's the exception that proves the rule. Looking back the other times I did a first person POV story, having an unnamed protagonist really took away from the story.

GETTING TO WORK

Elspeth Antonelli at BLOOD-RED PENCIL gives her 10 signs of a typical writing day. I hate to say it but #5 really hit home for me.

5.You love your plot. You love your characters. It's your actual writing of which you're not so enamoured.

You would think by now I would know that my rough drafts are rough, but a lot of times I look at what I'm writing and think it is unfixable.

WRITING STYLES

Roni Loren at FICTION GROUPIE talks about her writing method. Something I'll write about sometime.

WORLD BUILDING

It's nice to know that someone else builds worlds in a similar way that I do. SM “Frankie” Blooding talks about building worlds in the same geeky style I do. My favorite worlds to build are the one that already exist.

In THE SETTING EARTH I looked at the Dwarf Planet “Ceres” and how it is warmer than its surroundings and has traces of water vapor. From that I imagined what might make that happen and imagined a giant underground ocean and how with materials that are common in the asteroid belt giant undersea domes could be built. In the domes under Earth's atmosphere and Ceres 1/32 gravity a person could strap on a pair of wings and fly.

At other times I've used the Multiverse hypothesis to make towns where literally anything could happen, I've used Relativity to get revenge, I've made planets around red dwarfs habitable and all sorts of other things.

The world building using real physics, or at least hypothetical physics, is my very favorite part of writing.

That's a round up of the great tips that I stumbled across this morning.