Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers,

Voilà -- Voltaire! Philip Larkin explains the 'The Process of Poetry' in three simple steps.


Oy vey, the chutzpah! Daily Writing Tips has The 40 Yiddish Words You Should Know.


Plot to Punctuation echoes what I've been telling my probation officer for years: Villains are heroes too.


You tell me. Is CopyBlooger's 'The Eminem Guide to Becoming a Writing and Marketing Machine' the best titled tip of the day or what?


Three different approaches to dealing with writer's block, all from the same source. Swati Nitin Gupta's How to Avoid, How to Cure, and How to Take Advantage of Writer's Block. (Homegirl seems a li'l obsessed, no?)

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Toast Writers

We're three short days away from Christmas. It's time to put down that NaNoWriMo novel you're secretly rewriting and get to work on your non-denominational, safe for alkies, seasonal toast. The fact is, your friends and family already 'jokingly' refer to you as a 'wannabe' writer. If you can't come up with a memorable pre-martini mantra, they're really gonna start talking sh*t about you. That's why, in an effort to save what's left of your writerly rep, we've put together a short list of toast writing tips. If you use these and your toast still sucks...well, maybe your family's right.

eHow's How to Write a Great Toast

Toastmasters Tips on Holiday Toasts

How To Do Things' How to write a toast

Emily Posts' Toasting Tips and Sample Toasts

Life123's Great Tips for Making The Best Holiday Toasts

Purple Trails Party Ideas' Toasts – Tips For Giving A Great Toast

Ezine @rticles' Holiday Toasts - Setting the Tone For the Holiday Break

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

I'm listing it first, yet hoping you'll click on it last: How to turn off the internet while writing.


You see what I did there? I followed C.W.C.'s sage-like advice to Start with the Unexpected.


C.S. Lewis proffers a niggle of admonition regarding the utilization of voluminous words...hither.


Hilarious: The Rejectionist has assembled seven true-life writing tips gleaned from his/her viewing of Terminator: Salvation.


Yet another online article sure to appeal to aspiring authors looking for a secret shortcut to success: Publishing Perspectives' Inside the Secret World of Literary Scouts.

Writers on Writing

"Having imagination, it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that, if you were unimaginative, would take you only a minute. Or you might not write the paragraph at all." Franklin P. Adams

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

How many of The 14 Biggest Mistakes Even Best-Selling Writers Make have you made? And you're still unpublished? Weird.


The title sounds simplistic, but the advice is good: The Wall Street Journal asks successful authors How to Write a Great Novel.


Okay, so I probably should've shared this with you sooner: Men With Pens' 5 Things You Absolutely Need to Know Before You Write a Novel.


If you read The Business of Writing's 8 Tips for Writing Compelling Imagery and still can't come up with a quick and concise way to describe your lead vampire's crypt/crash-pad, stick your over-priced fountain pen in your ear. Now push.


Let's finish this up with the best bit of writing-related advice I came across this week. Guide to Literary Agents has been posting query letters that "succeeded in getting writers signed with agents," as well as thoughts from the agents as to why the letters worked. Steal liberally.

Writers on Writing

"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."
Samuel McChord Crothers

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

The title says it best: Why Writing Rubbish is Productive



Fiction Notes details the two types of feedback, as well as the five reactions to it.


Writing blogs are currently obsessed with correct comma usage. Don't believe me? Click here, here, and here.


Fiction Matters has 3 Questions To Better Understand Your Novel (that will also help you write a better query letter).


Bad Language About Writing's Open with a Punch, Close with a Kick would be more effective if most writers weren't potbellied pacifists.


Nothing cripples creativity like self-doubt. A quick read through Quips & Tips' 4 Signs You Need to Reevaluate Your Writing or Publication Goals and you'll be positively paralyzed. Hello, handicapped parking!

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

Ray Bradbury offers a bit of advice to flailing writers: Flail more.


Masturbate to this: Rants & Ramblings' How Book Royalties Work.


I'm not sure how scientific this list is, but it feels fairly feasible. Wordplay's Top 7 Reasons Readers Stop Reading. (Via.)


Doyce Testerman offers a helping hand to NaNoWriMo writers looking to pad out their anorexic opuses: The Rule of Three! (Via.)


Thanks to technology, learning to write no longer requires reading! A free recording of the 'teleclass' Breaking Into Food Writing is available here. (Via.)


A Distant Soil creator Collen Doran has compiled the links to all of her hard-won lessons about self-publishing and webcomics onto one easy-to-navigate table of contents. If you're considering a life in either, you'll wanna bookmark these.

Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips(as found on twitter) Part II!

The response to our original Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips over on the NaNoWriMo forum was so positive (well, except for the angry and damning responses, but who listens to those b*tches?) that we decided to put together a follow-up post. To keep things fresh, all of today's fictitious Tweets come courtesy of the NaNoWriMo forum members and the commentors on our LiveJournal page. Needless to say, all hate mail should be directed their way.

1 by Strawhenge:

@Chucky_P #NaNoWriMo tip: I am Jack's repeated sentence to convey tedium and madness.


1 by Ken Dee:

@M_ Crichton#NaNoWriMo tip: Copy entire chapters from science books as dialog. worked for all my books.


1 by Simmons:

@JaneA. #NaNoWriMo tip: It will do very well, if you please, to continually and properly refer to everyone as his or her well deserved title, always.


1 by Malfoys_Olive:

@Homer #NaNoWriMo tip: Begin in the middle of ur story, have MC recite entire story from beginning. Also refer to every1 in enumeratio (i.e. Apollo, the son of Zues)


1 by SlackJawedSmurf:

@JesusHChrist #NaNoWriMo tip: Have half ur book B backstory/prologue. Then have the main novel told from p.o.v. of several different people. Kill off a few characters, resurrect some, add an epilogue, hint at a sequel.

1 by unconventionalwriter:

@T_Pratchett #NaNoWriMoTip Put as many obscure philosophies & life lessons as U can. Also include scenes w/ Death, the representation.

2 by hasse:

@Will.i.am.Faulkner #NaNoWriMo tip: Emotions, descriptions, random outbursts of thought are all wonderful. Go for 100+ in 1 sentence!


@THE_BaRd #NaNoWriMo tip:Thou shalt not be brief. Brevity is the soul of wit, but wit shall come w/ edits. 4 now, debateth every action: 2 be, or not 2 be? Marry, decide later.

2 by a_tannenbaum:

@R_Chandler: Become an alcoholic & get fired from yr job in the midst of the Depression. If that doesn't force U 2 take up writing seriously, NOTHING will.


@HenryJames: My preferred method is a sort of thinking aloud, as it were, or more precisely, upon the page, thereby producing longish paragraphs which proceed, in a desultory way, from place to place, sometimes arriving somewhere, as if by accident and with an embarrassed air, as if not knowing how they got there; and sometimes, of course, not arriving anywhere in particular, though always ready to resume the journey, to who knows whither to find who knows what, and so, by an earnest seeking after truth, to come at last to the final shore of another completed novel, with maunderings and hesitations and vagueness enough to perplex scholars and bemuse the public.

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing NaNoWriMo Writers

This week's installment of Tuesday's Tips is dedicated to those delusional dilettantes who have taken up the National Novel Writing Month challenge: The completion of a 50,000 word novel in just 30 days. Having passed the halfway mark two days ago, I thought I'd offer these marathon imagineers the bookstore blogger's equivalent of a paper cup filled with lukewarm water -- randomly selected writing links!


You're 25,000 words in and suddenly it hits you: What if the book I'm writing isn't the "right" book? (Via.)


Or maybe you're having the opposite problem. Maybe you're 25,000 words in and already wondering, 'Hmn...What To Write Next?'


Then again, what if your problem isn't with what you are writing, but why you're not writing? Christina Baker offers a possible cure with Break the Block in Five Minutes. (Via.)


Did you know that in the time it took you to read these links, you could've already written another 200 words? S'true. Still, what's the rush? When writing anything of value, It Takes The Time It Takes.


With only 13 days and half a novel to go, editing may not be on the top of your to-do list. So why not try and kill two birds with one stone -- editing while you write. Copyblogger covers this concept in a piece titled, How To Write With A Knife.


Last but not least, Write to Done has 5 Simple First Draft Secrets. (An unsolicited 6th: Remember, first drafts are like learning to cook when you know you're the only one who's gonna eat it. Worse comes to worst, you stick your finger down your throat and vomit/place your finger firmly on the Delete key and curse the muse.)


Related:
Famous Authors' NaNoWriMo Tips (as found on twitter)
Top 10 Night Before NaNoWriMo Tweets
Tuesday's Tips for NaNoWriMo Writers 11/3/9

Tuesday's Tips for Flailing Writers

Rewriting the rewritten for the umpteenth time? Kidlit.com wonders, How Much Revision is Necessary?


Don't worry, R. Crumb -- jerking off to your own work isn't one of Fuel for Your Writing's 8 Nasty Writing Habits You Should Quit.


While some lucky sonsofb*tches were having sex with their teachers, you and I were picking up the 7 Bad Writing Habits You Learned in School.


Hope for the dying and decrepit: Writers Digest's Publish Your First Book After 50. (I mean, you're still gonna die, but at least you'll die published.)


You're a name on the internet and a celebrity in the blogosphere. Chris Anderson tells you how to turn that exposure into book sales.