Posts tagged writing
Resources for Writing
Writers Aiding Writers [currently and maybe always, a work in progress]
Today is #FridayFiction!
#FridayFiction is a flash fiction workshop that runs every week on Twitter from 3 - 6 p.m. PST, facilitated by Richard Hugo House. Each week, we pick a theme and create a story based off of that theme. We share it with the community of #fridayfiction writers by using the tag in our tweets. You can contribute more than one story. You can use the same character in every story, or multiple characters. The important thing is that your story, with the tag #FridayFiction, not exceed the 140 character limit that Twitter sets.
Why do we do this?
Flash fiction gives us a chance to re-examine our language in a way that we normally wouldn’t be able to do. The confines of the tweet force us to think of different ways of saying something, finding the word that communicates the biggest idea in the shortest way, and using Twitter allows us to find other writers on social media.
For more on why we write flash fiction and use Twitter to do it, read “Exercises in Brevity” on our website.
Last week’s #FridayFiction was “Lost”. Stories focused on lost objects, lost people, lost faith and yes, brilliantly, even 4 8 15 16 23 42! Click on the stories above to see an expanded view!
This week’s prompt is “Doom”:
What is the doom of your character or world within your story? How does one react to the threat of doom? Is it always at the end of a story?
Can doom ever be the beginning of the story? Hope rising from the ashes of destruction?
Take whatever viewpoint of doom you want. Set your character in it, rising from it, causing it…
As you write, try and experiment with POV, different characters, and feel free to write more than one story! Writing within the confines of a tweet is difficult, but it gets you into an incredible mindset. Find the right words to create the mood, the plot and convey character in the tiny space that you have.
Also, interact with the community! Every week, a lot of amazing writers gather together and share their stories. These people don’t just offer up great stories, they are great people to follow throughout the rest of the week as well. Being on Twitter is all about curating the conversation you want to be apart of and this is a great way to meet people who love being creative.
If you’ve been reading for a long time, please continue to enjoy our great stories, but also, feel free to offer up your own! You wouldn’t think, as vast a social network as Twitter is, that it’d be a safe space to offer up your fiction, but it is, and it’s a wonderful way to network with other creatives online.
Hope to see you and your flash fiction this afternoon!
102 Resources for Fiction Writers
Are you still stuck for ideas for National Novel Writing Month? Or are you working on a novel at a more leisurely pace? Here are 102 resources on Character, Point of View, Dialogue, Plot, Conflict, Structure, Outlining, Setting, and World Building, plus some links to generate Ideas and Inspiration.
CHARACTER, POINT OF VIEW, DIALOGUE
The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test
Priming the idea pump (A character checklist shamlessly lifted from acting)
Handling a Cast of Thousands – Part I: Getting to Know Your Characters
Establishing the Right Point of View: How to Avoid “Stepping Out of Character”
How to Start Writing in the Third Person
Web Resources for Developing Characters
What are the Sixteen Master Archetypes?
Fiction Writer’s Character Chart
Fiction Writer’s Character Chart
Villains are People, Too, But …
Top 10 Tips for Writing Dialogue
Advantages, Disadvantages and Skills (character traits)
How to Write a Character Bible
Character Development Exercises
All Your Characters Sounds the Same — And They’re Not a Hivemind!
Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Difference for Successful Fiction
Family Echo (family tree website)
Interviewing Characters: Follow the Energy
100 Character Development Questions for Writers
Lineage Chart Layout Generator
PLOT, CONFLICT, STRUCTURE, OUTLINE
How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method
Effectively Outlining Your Plot
Conflict and Character within Story Structure
Ideas, Plots & Using the Premise Sheets
Creating Conflict and Sustaining Suspense
Plunge Right In … Into Your Story, That Is!
Fiction Writing Tips: Story Grid
Tips for Creating a Compelling Plot
The Thirty-six (plus one) Dramatic Situations
The Evil Overlord Devises a Plot: Excerpt from Stupid Plotting Tricks
The Hero’s Journey: Summary of the Steps
Outline Your Novel in Thirty Minutes
SETTING, WORLD BUILDING
The Art of Description: Eight Tips to Help You Bring Your Settings to Life
Creating the Perfect Setting – Part I
An Impatient Writer’s Approach to Worldbuilding
Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions
Character and Setting Interactions
Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
Maps Workshop — Developing the Fictional World Through Mapping
IDEAS, INSPIRATION
Solve Your Problems Simply by Saying Them Out Loud
Writing Inspiration, or Sex on a Bicycle
Creative Acceleration: 11 Tips to Engineer a Productive Flow
The Seven Major Beginner Mistakes
Complete Your First Book with these 9 Simple Writing Habits
Free Association, Active Imagination, Twilight Imaging
Story Starters and Idea Generators
REVISION
One-Pass Manuscript Revision: From First Draft to Last in One Cycle
Revising Your Novel: Read What You’ve Written
Writing 101: So You Want to Write a Novel Part 3: Revising a Novel
TOOLS and SOFTWARE
My Writing Nook (online text editor; free)
Bubbl.us (online mind map application; free)
Freemind (mind map application; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
XMind (mind map application; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
Liquid Story Binder (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $45.95; Windows, portable)
Scrivener (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $39.95; Mac)
SuperNotecard (novel organization and writing software; free trial, $29; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
yWriter (novel organization and writing software; free; Windows, Linux, portable)
JDarkRoom (minimalist text editor; free; Windows, Mac, Linux, portable)
AutoRealm (map creation software; free; Windows, Linux with Wine)
writing resources
In a previous post I listed one extremely helpful resource all writers can take advantage of: Query Shark, run by Janet Reid. Since then I have clumsily stumbled across more. Some are serious. Some aren’t as serious. All should be bookmarked or followed, whether for fun or for the future; as a rule, it seems, those involved in the publishing field must be snarky and very good at making people laugh.
online writing groups
WritersBeat.com is a small and very dedicated group of writers. I recently joined this site under the username ‘kmz’. The forums offer prompts, places to receive feedback, information about publishing, and a very good group of people.
blogs (not tumblr)
The Book Lantern is a group who reviews, discusses, and critiques YA novels. Their intelligent and succinct articles apply to other types of fiction.
Genreality is a site where a group of romance authors discuss what being an author is really like and offer excellent tips and advice to aspiring authors.
blogs (on tumblr)
Neil Gaiman’s tumblr. Self-explanatory.
SlushPile Hell is a tumblr dedicated to the ‘slush pile’ of queries a literary agent accumulates.
(Mis)Adventures in Publishing covers publishing, writing, Words Which Should Exist, Words Which Do Exist But Nobody Uses, and life lessons.
Query Quagmire doesn’t just cover queries. It also talks about writing as a whole, editing, and revising, and offers excellent advice and insight.
If there are other blogs which should be on this list, tell me. I hope to make this blog useful someday.
-kmz
Gee, I don’t know how to research writing Characters of Color tastefully:
- So You Want to Write a Fantasy: Writing Female Characters
- So You want to Write a Fantasy: Culture
- SYWTWAF: Writing What you Don’t know
- A list of adjectives to describe physical attributes, Or, As it turns out, I could go to Starbucks with half this list
- Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
- Some primers
- More Primers
- RaceFail ‘09: Or where Deepad’s I didn’t dream of Dragons comes from, and why.
- Writing characters of Color
- Writing Outside your experience
- Media Representations Wiki - stereotypes/tropes/culture/etc
- On A:TLA’s whitewashing - All The World’s White, the Rest of Us merely live in it
- The Face of the Other: Do Manga & Anime characters look “white”?
- Describing Characters of Color pt 1 & Describing Characters of Color (pt 2)
- I Didn’t Dream of Dragons
- Shame
- So You Want to: Avoid Unfortunate Implications
- Transracial Writing for the Sincere
- Why Writing Colorblind is Writing White
- What a Girl Wants: Representation
- An Equal Place at the Table
- Avoiding LGBTQ Stereotypes
- The Problem With Colorblindness (and the Rest of Racebending.com)
- Making Movies for White People: A Tongue in Cheek critique of Minority Representation in the Media, or lack thereof
- From Margin to Center: Writing Characters of Color via Racialicious
- Writing Characters of Color - a helpful community!
- Why my Protagonists aren’t white (even though I am.)
- The Dangers of Telling a Single Story (a helpful Video)
- The Lack of People of Color in Historical Fictions
- How to Read and Respond to Literature of Color
- The Advantages of being a White Writer (in getting published)
- Writing Characters of Colour (Now With 10% Less White Liberal Anxiety!)
- Fic and Skin Tone (discusses Nyota Uhura, otherwise relevant)
- On Problematic Writing
- Writing Race in YA fiction: Debunking Myths
- Diversity Writers: How to Write People of Color
- The Importance of Inclusionary Writing
- Racialicious
- Overcoming the Noble Savage and the Sexy Squaw: Native Steampunk
- The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism’s After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour’s Perspective
- Beyond Victoriana: For EVERYTHING Steampunk/1800s/Industrial Revolution that isn’t just Victorian England and the archives Tales of the Urban Adventurer
- Can I just watch A Game of Thrones in Peace? (A brown feminist fan rant).
- Fantasy and Sci-Fi race Bingo
- Invoking Strangely Colored people
- Many Voices
- AfroFuturism, SciFi, and the History of the Future
- Some Open Thoughts on Race & Dsyutopia
- When Will White People Stop Making Movies like Avatar?
- Portraying POC in YA Fantasy: Are we There Yet?
- Debunking White Fantasy
- Racism in Fantasy
- Magical Realism is Fantasy written in Spanish.
1.) It’s not hard to figure out what to do, there are plenty of resources.
People say you have to get it right, do your research, but … what else are you supposed to research? It’s not like people with more pigment in their skin have completely different personalities than those with less, any more than any individual. It’s frustrating when I can’t even figure out what the heck people are talking about.
Bam. Research step one done for you.
2.) Writing characters of color/minorities is a good thing.I don’t like the notion that fantasy authors are under some kind of obligation to present ethnically diverse worlds. I’m English, and a fair sized part of English history consists of unwashed beardy white people in mead halls. If I’m inspired by my own history and cultural heritage, then that’s what I’m damn well going to write about. I’m not writing about some other culture just to appease the people who think there aren’t enough black characters in fantasy, or whatever. You want it, you write it. Nothing to do with me.
You’re wrong.
3.) Your all White Fantasy Land Didn’t Exist in Real Life:…the rather medieval one has more diversity than real medieval Germany probably had […] In a world with medieval means of transport, it just doesn’t seem natural to me to mix dark-skinned people with blue-eyed blondes in one setting. I just try to give the people a colour that fits the place where they live.
You mean like the people from Africa and the Middle east who began to take over Southern Spain, as well as the Jews who were pretty well spread out throughout Europe, the Middle Easterners they would have met on the Crusades, and the incoming Mongol Hordes who spread to the very edges of Eastern Europe before the empire finally collapsed? Don’t forget that Turkey is right there, and the silk road would have gone from Song Dynasty China, through India, and ended in Turkey before moving further westwards into places like Germany. Also the attempts at the Franco-Mongol alliance would have been pretty interesting. (That’s about the 13th century - arguably smack dab in Middle Ages Europe and definite contact between France/Christian Europe and the Mongolian Empire.)
Unless you’re writing everything in the far reaches of Denmark or something, historically speaking, I call bullshit on people who have societies that are only all white ever, because it’s just inaccurate. Consider the relative closeness of Northern Africa to Spain, or Turkey to the rest of Europe, the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Crusades, Slavery existing in Europe, including England, the slave trade, imperialism, Pax Mongolica, The Silk Road, Jewish Diaspora, the Islamic Empire vs The Holy Roman Empire, Egypt, Algeria, China’s sailing across the world, The Maruyan/Gupta Empires of India, tea trades, Columbus sailing in hopes of finding China, etc, etc, etc.
4.) I mean I just don’t believe you anymore. It’s unrealistic. Seriously guys.You’d think I’d just denied the holocaust or something. Get a grip. All I said was that I’m going to write about my own cultural experience and anyone who thinks I should do otherwise for the sake of political correctness can bugger off.
This isn’t even about being PC this is just not being wrong about everything.
good lord.
this is a good set of resources
(Source: turdlewexler, via captainbasils-deactivated201305)
