The BBC News Magazine rounds up 20 loathsome cliches -- a good blacklist to keep handy when you're trying to tighten up your own writing. Actually, to be fair, I'm not being funny but you know by the end of play today you could touch base with the team and, let's face it, roll out a raft of proposals to ensure communication is 110% going forward with these initiatives in the pipeline. Can't get your head around that? Basically, the fact of the matter is, to be honest, you can't just talk the talk, you've got to walk the walk -- the reason being that way, lessons will be learned.

One of the earliest examples of the novel in English was written entirely as letters from the protagonist, and most new communications mediums eventually end up being used as a structure for fiction (Lucy Kellaway's Who Moved My Blackberry? is a great example of the email novel genre). Guest blogger Brandon J. Mendelson at TwiTip offers some thoughts on his experience trying to write a "Twitter novel", The Falcon Can Hear The Falconer, posted one sentence at a time via a dedicated Twitter account. If you've always contemplated writing a novel but find the prospect of chapter-by-chapter writing and plotting scary, Twitter's inherent brevity and built-in audience commentary might be just the tonic. And if you've started a volume of social network fiction, share a link in the comments.

Sometimes you need to stop yourself from over-thinking your long-term ideas, pondering a better topic or angle, and just throw down and write something. Write or Die, a clever webapp from Jeff Printy, gives you both a stripped-down web space to write your text in and a bit of negative reinforcement if you let your mind, or your fingers, wander too far from the task at hand. Set a word count and time you want to write for. Then, set how you want the app to "remind" you if you stop writing—"Gentle" pops up a text box, "Normal" plays a harsh sound file, and "Kamikaze" mode slowly deletes back from your stopping point until you get back to it. Can't tell if "Electric Shock" is a joke or a feature in development. A bonus feature of Write or Die is that once you close the writing window, it asks to copy all your text to your clipboard—a serious salvation if you're the type to accidentally close browser windows. No sign-up required.

Web application Memiary will help you remember exactly what you did last Tuesday. Memiary helps you record and recall five events from your day in a fusion of twitter style brevity and journaling. After the brief and painless signup process, you begin filling in five daily entries about the activities of your day. You can search by a specific day or display your entries for a set week, month, year or all the entries you have ever made. Memiary is a free web based journaling application. Thanks John!

A thesaurus is a repetitive writer's best friend, but what happens when you're looking for a specific word, the one that starts with a certain letter, or means the same things as that other word? Free word search site Tip of My Tongue makes it easy to find that word that's just out of your fuzzy mind's reach. Type in parameters on the left—letters the word starts with or contains, definitions it matches, and others—and the word matches appears instantly on the right. It's worth a bookmark for anyone who's struggled at their keyboard, only to just type in, say, "useful."

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The Stepcase Lifehack blog pulls out a trusted tome, Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing, and extracts some wisdom from an accomplished economics professor on writing tight sentences that are thrifty with words (unlike, say, this sentence). Here's one bit especially relevant for online writers:

Always ask "So what?" ... Your reader's time is very valuable, and he or she could be doing a lot of different things. They have decided, for whatever reason, to take a look at something you have written ... Hit them between the eyes with why what you have done is important. Convince them immediately that they should keep reading your work instead of picking up something someone else has written or playing with the kids.

What writing or reference books do our more writerly readers go to for inspiration? Share your bookshelf in the comments.

If you're finding it hard to fall asleep once your head's on the pillow, even after reducing pre-sleep screen time, the Dumb Little Man blog has a few suggestions. Along with meditation, eating right, and novel reading, freelancer Monkia Mundell suggests a bit of writing:

Some people prefer to write into a diary, while others use a normal notepad. Whatever works for you is perfectly fine. Others yet use a gratitude journal. I love this, because it helps me to focus on the positive things in my life, rather than the negatives.

It's certainly true that trying to sleep while thinking of everything that's gone wrong, or possibly going wrong tomorrow, is much harder than forcing yourself to lighten up a bit. What's your favourite pre-sleep ritual that sets your mind to rest? Tell us in the comments. Photo by littledan77.

Getting a start in writing seems easier than ever in the blogging era, but getting your words into print in book form is still a daunting task. Seek inspiration from the author interview podcasts at the Sydney Writers Centre. Featured authors include comic novelist Nick Earl, hugely successful fantasy writer Garth Nix, and budget cookery specialist Rachael Bermingham, discussing how to get into print and tips for successful writing. You can grab the podcasts online or subscribe via iTunes.

For those writers hoping to hit the big-time with their book ideas, new social publishing company WEbook wants to recreate for books what Digg did for internet articles. Submit your work to WEbook and collaborate and vote on which writing is the best.

Shelve the notion of a solitary writer toiling alone for years in a dimly lit attic. WEbook.com is a place for lively writing groups, groundbreaking titles, and a chance for an engaged and creative community to find unrecognized talent and select the very best written works for publication as books, eBooks, and Audiobooks.

At WEbook, writers can get immediate feedback on their work. Reviewers can tear apart bad writing and make it better and everyone gets a chance to vote. If WEbook users vote your project as one of the best, WEbook will publish it, in print or electronic form, too. For a similar project, check out previously mentioned Authonomy.

One of the less pleasant parts of the book publishing industry is the slush pile -- the stack of unsolicited manuscripts that no-one wants to read, but which might just contain the next Dan Brown or Tim Winton amongst the detritus. UK publisher HarperCollins is experimenting with using the crowdsourcing approach to change its approach to the slush pile, and its site Authonomy moving out of private beta this week. Authonomy lets authors upload chapters of work in progress and comment on each others' writing, with the promise that the highest-ranked works (based on site user recommendations) will be considered by Harper Collins editors. Managing the process as the beta expands could be challenging, I suspect, but it's a novel way of identifying new writing talent.