Elizabeth S. Craig @elizabethscraig : An all-things-writers feed, especially tweeting links to choice articles from writers’ blogs.  Recent tweet:

Porter Anderson @porter_anderson : Quotes from writers and retweeted articles from writers’ blogs. Recent tweet:

Janice Hardy @janice_hardy : Tons of great links to writing resources and tips on writing craft. Recent Tweet:

Jon Winokur @advicetowriters : Quotes by writers, for writers. Recent tweet:

Joanna Penn @thecreativepenn : Tips and tricks for writing and info about e-publishing and indie publishing. Recent tweet:

Ashley Barron @dcPriya : Interviews with self-pub authors about their craft, their books and their business. Recent tweet:

Gene Lempp @genelempp : Advice on publishing, writing, and general creativity. Recent tweet:

YA Lit @4yalit : Photography inspiration and tips on writing craft for everyone (not just YA authors). Recent tweet:

Writer’s Digest @writersdigest : News on publishing and publicity from a favorite writer’s magazine. Recent tweet:

Writer’s Relief @writersrelief : Hints and tips on submissions and publishing in various genres. Recent tweet:

If you aren’t involved with Twitter yet, you should consider signing up. If the twitterverse seems big and scary, check out this awesome writer’s guide to twitter (by Debbie Ridpath Ohi AKA Inkygirl). Make sure to follow these and other writers in order to build your very own writing community on twitter. Their resources and advice can be priceless both as you improve your own writing and learn about the business of writing.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Top Book Picks, and then on Friday we’ll party!

Duotrope: A great search engine for all manner of literary magazines. The search engine is subdivided by genres, style, length, subject, payment, publishing type, and a few other options so you can thoroughly narrow your search results. If you were wondering where that feminist poem is going to fit, or where you’ll publish your aliens-and-spaceships short story, this is the place to look!

Query Shark: Janet Reid’s humorous blog that critiques query letters. What’s so helpful about it is that she comments on real queries (names redacted of course) and points out common mistakes that she sees as a literary agent. You’ll learn a great deal just from seeing her critique of other people’s queries, and you will come to laugh with her at the often hilariously foolish queries that some send in. If you’re brave enough, you might even test the shark-ridden waters with your own!

AgentQuery and QueryTracker: Two Picks for the price of one! Both of these sites are search engines for literary agents. They do for novel queries what Duotrope above does for short fiction and poetry. You can search for agents by location and genre, as well as get some detailed help with how to query. On AgentQuery, you can even submit queries to forums and receive helpful feedback from authors in similar boats. At QueryTracker, you can keep track of query submissions to various agents and the dates of their replies.

Rachelle Gardner: Rachelle is a literary agent with a good deal of advice from the “inside” view of publishing. She posts articles such as “Is There Room for Originality?” and “9 Ways to Outwit Writer’s Block.” Her posts are definitely worth checking out!

We Grow Media: Dan Blank’s site is dedicated to “Helping Writers & Publishers Make an Impact and Build Their Legacies.” His lessons and courses focus around writer platforms and how writers can best use social media. The newsletter is especially worth your while, as it features the best articles that will help authors get the most out of their tweets or grow their platforms.

InkyGirl: A children’s author/illustrator and young persons’ novelist, Debbie has a lot of great blog articles on her writing process. She has sections called “Writer’s Guide to Twitter” and “250, 500, 1000 Words/Day Writing Challenge,” which encourages readers to select one of those goals and then consistently write so many words a day. Being an illustrator, she also includes hilarious comics on the site which are sure to tickle any writer’s funny bone.

Jane Friedman: As a professor of e-media, soon-to-be online editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review, and a former publisher of Writer’s Digest, Jane has quite a few things to say about social media, writing, networking, e-books, trends online and how they all interconnect. Her knowledge is invaluable. We also love Porter Anderson’s guest column, Writing On the Ether, for his news, humor and sheer vocabulary.

ChaoticShiny: A personal favorite for years. Though the countless writing-inspired generators (such as “Pantheon,” “Medieval Army,” and “Apocalypse”) might initially seem suited for sci-fi and fantasy writing, there are also quite a few resources for writers of other genres as well, such as the character generators and story/plot generators. You might use them in times of resolute writer’s block to kick-start your writing, or pick and choose different tools to use in your stories.

Write On Con: A hidden internet gem! Write On Con is an online, free writing conference. Though it happens only once a year (this year’s dates are August 14 and 15), the site is active with contests and news mostly year-round. Like ‘real-life’ conferences, Write On Con roster features tons of authors, agents and editors.

NaNoWriMo and Story A Day: Last but not certainly not least, some of the best resources out there for novelists and short story writers. NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is active in November. It’s a worldwide endeavor which challenges you to write a 50,000 word novel, start to finish in one month. From personal experience, it’s the only time I’ve ever actually finished a novel. They’ve got all manner of forums and you can even sign up by region and meet other writers in person (gasp!) near you. Other programs include Camp Nano (during July and August) and Script Frenzy (in April). Story A Day is similar to NaNo, except you are challenged to write one short story every day in May!

So there you have it – our Top 10 (twelve, actually) Picks for writerly websites! Stay tuned – tomorrow we’ll have our list of Top Twitter Picks and on Thursday we’ve got Top Book Picks. And don’t forget about the Blog Party this weekend! Be thinking about what favorite resource you’ll share!

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This post is not a guilt trip, I promise.

To make all of our lives easier, here at DIYMFA we’ve decided to join forces with the writing community in a weekend-long Blog Party. The goal? To create the best, most definitive and most helpful list of writing resources ever!

Here’s the plan:
Tomorrow (Tuesday) we will break the ice with our (Gabriela & Becca’s) lists of personal favorites. First is Top 10 Website Picks. On Wednesday, we will post Top 10 Twitter Feed Picks, and on Thursday we’ll conclude with Top 10 Book Picks. Friday, of course, will kick-start our party! Be sure to mark your calendars, because we need YOUR help to come up with the most definitive Best. Resource. List. Ever!

So join the party, and help make the world a better place for time-wasting writers. At least with this list, you’ll be spending your extra time wisely. Everyone needs a break once in a while, don’t they?

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Anyone who’s ever taken a writing class has had to do the eavesdropping exercise.  You know, that exercise where you go to a public place and listen in on someone’s conversation and write everything down.  This is not that exercise.

Prompt: Go to a public place, somewhere with enough ambient noise that you can’t really hear specific conversations.  Pick a pair of people sitting far enough away that you can’t hear what they’re saying, but close enough that you can see their facial expressions and mannerisms well.

Observe these people for ten minutes or so.  Jot down notes if you like.  Try to figure out what they’re saying.  Imagine the dialogue that goes with the actions and facial expressions you see.  After your ten minutes are up, sit down and write the scene, dialogue and all.  You have 20 minutes to write it.

This exercise was inspired by reading David Mamet’s Master Class Memo to the Writers of THE UNIT.  If you want to learn to create great drama in your story, you must read this memo.

Hi everyone.  Just a quick post here today to let you know that I’ve written a guest post over at StoryADay.org.  It’s all about revision–in particular revising short stories, though you can used the technique in the post to revise just about any piece of fiction.

Also, if you haven’t already checked out the StoryADay website, you should.  Even if you’re not doing the challenge, there are prompts and other great resources there that you can use whether you’re participating or not.  To see my guest post go here.

Write on!

There are some circumstances when these might actually be useful, the trouble is that writers tend to overuse them.  Think of the Nine NO’s as little flags in your writing that merit a second look.  If you catch yourself using one of them, look closer and see if you can work your way around it.  If not, then that probably means that this NO happens to work in that situation.

Nine NO’s of Dialogue:

1. Name-calling.  Name-calling is when characters call each other by name in dialogue.  For example:

“So Bill, how’s everything going?” Jill asked.
“Not to bad, Jill,” Bill replied.  “Thanks for asking.”

While this technique might seem like a convenient way to establish who’s saying what, people don’t actually speak this way in real life.  Name-calling smacks of distrust from the writer to the reader.  It’s as though the writer is afraid the reader won’t be able to figure out who’s talking so to make sure that doesn’t happen, the writer inserts names into the dialogue.  Instead of solving the problem, the dialogue ends up sounding clunky and stilted.

2. Fussy tags.  Tags are the “he said, she said” part of dialogue.  Remember back in elementary school, when your teacher taught a lesson on synonyms and made you list as many different variations on the word “said” as you could think of?  Hate to break it to you but when it comes to writing good dialogue, your elementary school teacher was wrong.

What’s wrong with adding a little variety, you ask?  Nothing in theory but a lot in practice.  While some of these alternate “said” words might work in special situations (like if someone’s whispering, it can be useful to say “he whispered”) a lot of times, writers will use one of these words as if at random, just for the sake of switching things up. The beauty of using “said” is it doesn’t draw attention to itself.  After a while, the tags just disappear into the background and the reader forgets about them altogether.

3. Talking-head syndrome.  You’ve seen this before, I’m sure.  The dialogue bounces back and forth between the characters and you have no idea where the characters are and why they’re talking in the first place.  In fact, the characters seem to talk just for the sake of talking and there are no actions to ground us in the scene itself.

The solution?  Add some stage directions.  If speech is the part that’s spoken by the characters, then the stage directions are the actions that accompany those lines.  Imagine the scene you’re writing is a play and you’re the director.  You need to tell the characters when they should shift in their seats or sip their lattes.  This can be especially useful if you want to convey to the reader that the character is feeling some emotion, but you don’t want the character to come right out and gush about their feelings.  Remember, actions can speak much louder than words.

4. On-the-nose dialogue.  Anyone who’s ever had a conversation knows that people rarely mean exactly what they say.  It’s like that part in the movie Clueless where the daughter comes downstairs wearing an extremely revealing dress and this dialogue follows:

“What’s that?”
“A dress, Daddy.” She giggles.
“Says who?”
“Calvin Klein.”

If we look just at the words that are spoken, it seems like father is simply inquiring as to the couture his daughter happens to be wearing.  Um, no.  When he asks “What’s that?” what the father is really saying is “What on earth do you think you’re wearing?”  The daughter’s response is as sweet as it is patronizing.  When the dad responds in turn with “Says who?” he might as well be telling her to go upstairs and change her clothes, but instead she volley’s back: “Calvin Klein.”  Game.  Set. Match.  The dialogue itself consists of nine words, but it’s saying much more than just those words.  It’s called subtext and it’s a good thing.

5. Rambling start.  Usually when dialogue happens in real life, there’s a build up to the actual meat of it.  People ask each other how they’re doing and “how ’bout that weather” and “waddayaknow about the Giants.”  And then, after about ten minutes, one person comes out with the real reason they’re talking.  This is how we’ve all been taught to behave because it’s polite and it’s what you do.  But on the page, you don’t time for all that lead-up because you’ll lose your readers interest before you get to the good stuff.  Instead, cut straight to where the dialogue gets interesting and start there.  After all, wouldn’t you rather read a dialogue that starts with “Why the hell have you been sleeping with my husband?” than something like “Hey Sally, nice to see you.”  Get to the good stuff as fast as you can.

6. Too many adverbs.  I’ve talked about adverbs before when we discussed description.  The same ideas are true here.  Nouns and verbs give you vibrant language and adverbs often end up sounding too flowery and over-the-top.  Nine times out of ten, when you see an adverb it usually means the verb isn’t specific enough.  “He said softly” becomes much more specific when you say “he whispered.”  Or better yet: “He said, his breath tickling her ear” or “He said, his voice sweet and smooth like syrup.”  The word “softly” doesn’t give us a very good idea of who the character is or what his intentions are, but the other examples make the character and his actions much more vivid.

In the words of Strunk & White: “Do not dress up words by adding -ly to them, as if putting a hat on a horse.” Keep things simple and when you can, use vibrant nouns and verbs that capture your idea

7. Exposition in dialogue.  This is when writers use dialogue to convey information to the reader rather than to have one character share information with another character.  Suppose one character says to another: “Dude, you’ve failed all your classes two semesters in a row.  Your parents are gonna have a cow.”  Clearly “Dude” knows that he’s failed his classes two semesters in a row.  He was there.  He’s the one who made it happen.  There is no reason for his buddy to tell him that in dialogue except that perhaps the writer needs to convey this valuable insight to the reader.

With the classic exception of a comic book villain giving the “this is why I tried to take over the world” monologue, there is really no reason to use exposition in dialogue.  And even in the case of a comic book villain, this kind of exposition in dialogue is ridiculous.  I mean, if you were trying to take over the world, wouldn’t you just do it, rather than wasting valuable time with some long monologue about why you’re doing it? Inevitably, that monologue is always the villain’s undoing because it gives the hero time to think of a plan and win.

Repeat after me: dialogue is communication between characters, not communication between writer and reader.  Do not confuse the two.

8. Dialogue “zits.”  In real life people say “um” and “so” and “well” but in fictional dialogue that stuff is just plain distracting.  It’s like a big red zit on your dialogue’s nose, it doesn’t add anything to the picture and it’s nothing but a distraction.  Zap those suckers whenever you can.  Sure, you may have the occasional situation where a “well” or a “hmm” or some other such blip might come in handy, but if you find your characters are leaning on these words too much, get rid of them pronto.

9. Breaking character.  Perhaps one of the biggest problems in dialogue is that an author puts words in the character’s mouth, but those are words that the writer might say but the character would never actually say them.  If you’re going to make your character use 10-dollar words, make sure that it fits the character’s personality.

Sometimes you can play this up for humor, like in the movie Catch Me If You Can when the protagonist is posing as a doctor.  He’s been learning all the doctor lingo by watching hospital soap operas and on those shows the doctors are always asking each other if they “concur” with a diagnosis.  So when the protagonist is playing doctor himself, he keeps asking the other doctors if they “concur” even though it’s obvious to the audience that he has no idea what anybody’s saying, much less what he’s concurring to.  In this case, the fact that the character is using fancy language serves to underscore his ignorance about all the medical terminology that’s being thrown at him.

As I mentioned before, these are not the “Nine Nevers” of dialogue so if you have to break one of these “rules” every so often, it’s not the end of the world.  Just be aware of these “Nine NO’s” and if you do use one or more of them in your writing, do it on purpose and not by accident, or worse yet out of laziness.  Like my middle school band teacher used to say:

“If you’re gonna play it wrong, play it good and loud and wrong.”

Scenario 1
A line of dialogue plus a tag is one full sentence, so you use a comma before the end-quote and before the tag.

“My name is Susan,” she said.

Scenario 2
If the spoken part is followed by another full sentence, then you put a period before the end-quote and begin the new sentence with a capital letter.

“My name is Susan.” She extended her right hand.

Scenario 3
Sometimes you have both a tag and a stage direction together.  In that case, the stage direction is usually a subordinate clause so it’s still part of the same sentence as the spoken part.

“My name is Susan,” she said, extending her right hand.

Question marks and exclamation points are tricky because they can behave either like commas or periods depending on the situation.

“What’s your name?” she asked.
“What’s your name?” She leaned in to hear the answer.
“What’s your name?” she asked, leaning in to hear the answer.

“Somebody help me!” she screamed.
“Somebody help me!” She collapsed from exhaustion.
“Somebody help me!” she screamed before collapsing from exhaustion.

Once you’ve got these three scenarios down, all other dialogue punctuation issues will fall into place.

Prompt: Extract an outline from your current Work-In-Progres (WIP).  If your WIP is finished, go through it scene by scene outlining what you have.  If you’re still in the middle of your WIP, do the exercise for what you have so far then brainstorm a couple of different directions your story can take.

Extracting an outline is a great way to figure out what you have in your story already and see where the holes are so you can fill them.  I find this technique to be most helpful when I’m trying to work out the details of my plot.  I outline what’s already in my WIP, then figure out which pieces are missing and decide how I’m going to fill those gaps.

Unlike traditional techniques, this technique forces you to look at a topic from multiple different angles. It also makes it easy for you to see an entire project in one glance, rather than having to read through line-by-line to get a sense of the full story.  While it usually lends itself more toward nonfiction, mind mapping can also be a great way to brainstorm ideas for a fiction project.

How to Apply this to Fiction: Try mind-mapping your story or novel by making each of the main branches as chapter topics or major events in the story.  The sub-branches can be scenes that sub-divide these larger branches.  There are no rules with mind-mapping so feel free to doodle and make notes (I use thought bubbles and speech bubbles to add notes to my mind maps, as you can see in the image.)

Here’s the very first mind map I used to brainstorm DIY MFA back in 2010 when it was just a glimmer of an idea..

Story Maps

We talked about this one in Tuesday’s post: Mapping Out Your Story but here’s a recap for those of you who missed it.

I love subway maps.  What can I say, I’m a New Yorker so it’s in my blood.  Recently, I started outlining stories using New York-style subway maps.  Just as subway lines intersect, different subplots weave in and out of the main plot thread in a novel or short story.  I like to think of writing as a journey so to me, this idea of mapping out a story works. Tip: If the subway analogy doesn’t resonate with you, try thinking of the map as roadways with local exits and big intersections.

How to Apply this to Fiction: The different threads in a story are in different colors.  Scenes in each thread are marked as subway stops (or exits).  If a scene applies to more than one story thread, then it becomes an intersection.  What I love about this technique is that when I sit down to write a scene, all I’m writing is a “dot” of the story.  Dot’s aren’t big and scary; they’re cute and round.  They’re just dots for crying out loud!  Somehow in my mind, it seems a lot more manageable.

Here’s a subway map of one of my favorite novels, The Hunger Games.

Scene Cards

This technique is super-portable, which is one of the reasons I love it.  Take a stack of index cards and make one card for each scene you know needs to happen in your story.  What’s nice about this technique is that you don’t have to write the scenes in order (you can move the cards around), and you can always add more cards later if you think you need them. 

How to Apply this to Fiction: On each card write the following information.

•  Scene Title: Something easy to remember like “Scene where Jimmy falls from the tree.”
• Characters: Who’s in this scene?
• Events: What happens?
• Setting: Where are we?
• Purpose: Why do you need this scene? (Character development? Important plot point? Reveal important information?)  This last one is crucial because if you can’t think of a purpose for the scene then you have to question whether you need the scene at all.

Some computer programs actually have an index card function built in (Scrivener, for instance) which is nice because it makes editing and moving the cards around even easier.  I still like the old-fashioned method because it means I can grab a handful of cards and take it with me anywhere.

Also, for those of you who love spreadsheets, you can do the exact same thing but use Excel or some other spreadsheet software.  Just make each of the bullet points above into columns on the chart and have each row represent a different scene.  Voila!  You have your story in spreadsheet form.

Rough Sketch

This technique got a post all of it s own back in March called Rough Sketch: A Snapshot to Capture Your Work-In-Progress.  The idea behind the rough sketch is to capture the main elements of your story in a one-page document.  It forces yourself to really narrow down the complexities of your story into the few most important elements and makes it easy for you to see the overall trajectory at a glance.  What’s also great about this technique is that you can give copies of it to critique partners new to your story to bring them up-to-speed.

How to Apply this to Fiction: Download a Rough Sketch worksheet and fill it out!  For more details, read the post on the Rough Sketch to learn what each part of the worksheet means.

Have I convinced you yet that outlines can be awesome?  Try one of these techniques–one that’s new to you–and see if it works for you!

Each road or subway line represents a different story-thread or plot line.  The dots (exits on the highways or subway stops) represent different scenes or moments in the story.  Black dots represent local exits or subway stops (moments that apply only to that one storyline) while the white dots indicate moments where two or more plot lines intersect.

By mapping your story out in this way, you can tease apart the different plot threads in your story and make sure that each story arc makes sense in terms of build-up and tension.  Also, it can be difficult to juggle multiple story threads at the same time so when you use this subway map technique, you can isolate the main plot or one of the subplots and look at it separate from the others.

For an example of this type of outline click on the image.  The map shows a (very basic) outline Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games.  (Note: Because this is an outline, it inevitably includes spoilers.  You have been warned.)

How do you put together a story map like this?  Here’s a step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Write out your scenes.  I like to use index cards for this step, where for each scene I jot down a brief description of who is in the scene, what happens and why the scene is important to the story overall.  The why is key because if I can’t figure out what purpose a particular scene serves in the story, then it probably means that scene is dispensable and I should get rid of it.

Step 2: Figure out your main story threads and the Dramatic Question related to each.  Every novel has a main plot thread and at least one or two subplots.  Each of these plot threads is driven by what’s called the Dramatic Question.  For the main plot thread we have the Major Dramatic Question (MDQ) and for the subplots we have what I like to call the Lesser Dramatic Questions (LDQ’s).  These Dramatic Questions boil down each plot thread and propel them forward.

For example, in The Hunger Games the Major Dramatic Quesiton is: Will Katniss survive the Hunger Games?  We also have questions that relate to the subplots of the novel (such as the love story between Katniss and Peeta or her relationship to her younger sister, Prim).  Those questions are: Will Katniss love Peeta back? and Will Katniss be able to protect her family?  These are the questions that readers will be holding their breath to find out the answers to as the plot threads develop.

Step 3: Sort out your scenes according to which plot threads they relate to.  Remember, some scenes can belong in more than one plot thread.  In fact, most key scenes in a novel (like big turning points or the climax) will relate to multiple plot lines.  I usually do this step by drawing colored dots on each index card. The color of each dot indicates the plot thread(s) where that scene belongs.

Step 4: Draw your map.  Now that you have your scenes sorted out and you know which scene falls where, you can draw your map and look at how the different plot lines intercept.  You can also separate the main plot from the subplots and see how each individual arc works.

What I like about this technique:

• It allows you to look at plot lines together and individually whereas most outline techniques force you to look at all plot lines at once.
• It forces you to think about your story’s major dramatic question (and the lesser dramatic questions).  This means you have to be able to boil down each plot line to one question.  If you can do that, then you know the main plot of your story.
• It’s very visual so at a glance you can see your entire story and how everything fits together.  This is especially helpful for writers like me, who are more visually-than-verbally oriented and have a tough time with traditional outlines.