I collect inspirational and insightful writing tips, and would love for them to help you and your own writing.
Recommended writing books
Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
Now Write! Fiction, edited by Sherry Ellis (This book is so inspiring that I had to force myself to keep reading and not stop to write.)
On Writing, by Stephen King (Made me cry. Inspirational for every writer wondering how to make a living doing what we love.)
The Right to Write, by Julia Cameron (Advocates for making writing a fun part of our daily life. So many quotable lines in this book …)
Online resources & communities
NaNoWriMo
NaNoWriMo started as National Novel Writing Month, which takes place in November each year. Writers all over the world encourage each other to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Camp NaNoWriMo is a virtual writing retreat that takes place annually in April and July: participants can set any personal writing goals to achieve during those months.
NYC Midnight
Weirdly, participating in NYC Midnight’s 2017 Short Story Challenge almost taught me as much about writing as my five year university degree program. NYC Midnight offers a number of different writing challenges throughout the year, in fiction and screenwriting, and is open to writers all over the world. The contest forums are active and many participants find that the feedback they get from their peers on their shared stories is a highlight of the experience. I appreciate how the fiction contests expose writers to genre fiction (i.e. crime, romance, sci fi) as well as literary.
One Stop for Writers
Well worth the subscription price ($9/month or $90/year USD), members get access to Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi’s collection of thesauruses, including The Emotion Thesaurus, The Rural Setting Thesaurus, and so much more. There are oodles of other tools on this site, but the thesauruses alone are worth signing up.
Scribophile
My writing peep Angie loves Scribophile. Scribophile is a free, online community of writers who share their writing and give feedback on each other’s. The more you critique, the more you can submit — or you can bypass this karma system by paying for a membership. Angie says she’s learned a ton about her own writing by reading others’ drafts. She recommends you find some groups you like, and share drafts within that group.
Scrivener
I was struggling to manage my 44,000+ word manuscript with Google Docs and desktop files and so finally embraced the magic that is Scrivener. This software makes it simple to jump around from scene to scene, make notes, keep a daily and overall word count, and much more. The “help” documentation and tutorials are overly wordy, and you’ll need DropBox to back up your documents or access them from different devices, but otherwise I have no complaints. You can try the $45 USD software for free for a month.
Writers Helping Writers
This website is so rich in helpful content that it’s essentially an MFA you can do from home. Check out the Resources for Writers page and the Tools for Writers page … I could spend happy months working through all this content. My favourite resource so far from the site is the Character Profile Questionnaire. For example: “If you walked blindfolded into a room where your character’s voice was one of many, which element would allow you to identify your hero’s from the rest?”
