Wednesday links: Breadcrumbs and that one writer an agent won’t work with

I love regularly reading tips and advice articles in certain subjects — particularly writing and publishing. I don’t always need the information right then, but I know that it’ll eventually come in handy. Or at least, I hope it will.

I know there are a lot of other people out there who feel the same way I do, but sometimes it can be difficult to find every useful advice article that’s out there. So I thought I’d bring you a few.

Here are the tips and advice articles that jumped out at me the most over the past week.

1. The Breadcrumbs At The Beginning Of The Story, from Terribleminds: When someone picks up your novel to read it for the first time, you want to capture them. If they’re going to finish it, then they need to want to. There has to be something that hints of what’s to come, but that doesn’t reveal too much. Excerpt: “That said, I found one common thread — a singular critique — that I was able to apply to each and every manuscript I encountered. That common critique is about beginning your story.”

2. The One Writer I Will Not Represent, from Books & Such: Anybody who has held a job knows there are certain types of people that they don’t like to work with. In this post, Wendy Lawton discusses the one type of writer that she refuses to work with. Excerpt: “We talk a lot about the kinds of writers we love to work with but when we agents get together the talk often turns to the writers we hate representing. And there is always one standout– one writer we all cite as the writer we’d most hate to represent.”