It’s incredible how many of us out there are writers, and I love that! Especially that there are more seasoned writers willing to help others to get started and tweak our techniques.
I think it’s important to know what we’re getting into from the moment you decided you want to write a book, or anything that you want to publish, for that matter. It’ll save you from embarrassing stuff like what happened with my awful first draft.
I wouldn’t call myself a newbie anymore, but wouldn’t dare consider myself able to push out detailed tips on how to write this way or that, or do x thing. And in fact, if I did tell you that, it’d be from something I learned from these resources I’m going to tell you guys about.
Books
A wonderful book on structure and crafting a concise plotline. I absolutely adored this because it guided me step by step through the basic structure of a story, and what is expected of it. It’s up to us to mix things up a bit or follow these guidelines, but you’ll see that most of it are things you had already figured out but explained in a way that makes so much sense you’ll want to reread.
At the end of each chapter there is a takeaway value section with bullet points of the most important stuff to remember from that chapter. This book is a very much needed writing companion of mine.
Unlike others, Mrs. Hall’s Writing Fight Scenes isn’t focused on teaching me how to fight. It’s goal is to give us enough info about fights for us writers to use in order to write realistic fight scenes without having sign up for self-defense classes.
Dialogue for writers follows the line of your story. How to use dialogue to hook, to add tension, to add conflict to your story without once being boring. I like how it covers everything from the structure of sentences themselves to the style and sound of dialogue. The punctuation part was expecially helpful XD
The Emotion Thesaurus compiles a list of emotions with possible physical reactions, and related verbs and emotions writers can use to better illustrate characters, avoiding clichés and without burning your brain.
Blogs and Websites
Writer’s Digest
For writers in every stage of their publishing or writing process, this site is full with tons of advice and news from the publishing world.
* 11 Secrets to Writing Effective Character Description
* You Should Write From Multiple POVs if Your Story Demands It
Writability
I like checking Ava Jae’s blog regularly because being closer to my age group and also, someone who recently landed a deal for her book (YAY!), she has some awesome insight into the publishing world, also, her vlogs (MARVEL ROCKS).
* On the Romanticization of Writers
* Top 5 Twitter Pitch Mistakes
Helping Writers Become Authors
This is author K.M Weiland’s blog for everything writing related. She’s the author of Structuring Your Novel, and all I can say is that HER CONTENT IS GOLD.
* Most Common Writing Mistakes, Pt. 40: Unnecessary Scenes
Your Writer Platform
This was the site that gave me that push I needed to create my own blog. I liked it because while most blogs that are about building a platform always seem to offer advice to non-fiction writers, Kim includes us fiction writers too. Because for us, it’d be quite hard to make a book out of our blog content. We need a different approach.
* The Writer’s Guide to Building an Email List
* Set Up Your WordPress Blog in Under 15 Minutes
Generators
I LOVE this thing.
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