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Tweeting Work In Progress

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Elizabeth Redman

Jun 22, 2010

Sharing your work with others can be a terrifying experience. Readers can be pretty brutal in their criticism, though, so it’s key to workshop and polish your writing as much as possible before publication.

One helpful hint doing the rounds of the internet this week is to share snippets of your work on Twitter. Pick one line and post it with the hashtag #wip, suggests blogger Natania Barron. This will force you to look closely at your writing while easing you into the process of sharing your work, she adds.

The flipside is that if you want to practise your editing, searching under #wip on Twitter will present a treasure trove of exercises. Worried about flabby phrases? Do a search and spend some time rewriting whatever pops up. Tweet your suggestions to the original author – you know that they’re looking for feedback.

Some writers also tweet links to longer extracts of work they have posted online, tagging it with #wip. Reading their drafts might be a good way to pass some time, but be careful before posting yourself. Some publishers apparently treat work that has appeared online as already ‘published work’, which can affect rights you can sell in the future – read the fine print.

Have you used the #wip hashtag? If not, try it out. Let us know how you fare in the comments section.