Get your work recognized: write a brag document
Get your work recognized: write a brag document
Is that Me in Your Novel? When Life Imitates Fiction
Has somebody accused you of writing about them when you don't even know them? Sometimes your fiction can trigger people when life imitates fiction.
Who Has the Right to Be a Writer?
One day, in my intro to creative writing class, after I had my students spend a few minutes free-writing in response to a Frida Kahlo painting, one of them raised her hand. “Do you mind if I ask a…
10 Universal Writing Rules from The Onion’s Founding Editor
Scott Dikkers shares the 10 writing rules that took The Onion from a local print magazine to a globally renowned media house with nearly 20 million social followers and over 10 million monthly visitors.
Why You Should Flash Your Fiction
Claire Fuller shares the many ways flash fiction can be useful to all types of writers, even if your word count is usually in the thousands.
Is it okay to deface books for art?
In this week’s mailbag: Have you ever made an altered book?
Top 5 Resources for Dictating Your Work.
1. Dragon Naturally Speaking by Nuance. Dragon is pretty much the gold standard for dictation. And Nuance seems to have invented the entire industry before dictation was cool. They have deep roots in medical transcription, for example. Die hard dictators swear by the PC version of this software. The Macintosh version was (puzzlingly) discontinued last year. Since Dragon has such a big reach, lifelong Mac users have been known to purchase cheap PCs to run this software.
Alexander Chee on How to Unlearn Everything
When it comes to writing the “other,” what questions are we not asking?
Advice and techniques on the craft of writing
The Granta team share writing techniques and advice from their archives.
The Heart of a Novel: Its "About-ness"
Barbara Linn Probst delves into the very heart of your novel: its "About-ness." Learn the questions (and answers) that help your story resonate deeper with readers.
Lydia Davis: Ten of My Recommendations for Good Writing Habits
Adapted from the essay “Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits” in Essays One. * The following are just my personal pieces of advice. They won’t be the same as someone else’s, and they may …
Why Word Count Matters
50,000 words isn't an arbitrary number
So You Want to Be a Novelist
Do yourself a favor and read these 10 pieces of advice first.
Ocean Vuong: The 10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel
As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind, someone that comes “out of nowhere” or had “splashed onto the scene” unannounced, seemingly without a pre-…
What Is Writing and Does This Count as It?
Writing is when you sit—fingertips hovering over your keyboard, cursor blinking on a fresh blank document—and open Twitter for the twenty-eighth time.
How to Finally Write Your Nonfiction Book
No, it will not be easy. Yes, it will be rewarding. (Eventually.)
How to create a muse board as visual inspiration for your stories
What if instead of searching through files looking for a character profile or rifling back through chapters, all you had to do was look up? That is the just one example of the brilliance of creating a muse board.
Kim Sherwood: How I found my voice as a writer
The author of Testament, which won the Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award 2019, shares the story of her creative journey
13 of the Best Creative Writing Blogs on the Internet
I asked my team to put together a list of the best creative writing blogs on the internet. Here are the top 13 they recommend.
Free resources for writers - National Centre for Writing
Free guides, podcasts and interviews about writing. Featuring Margaret Atwood, Nicci French, Tim Clare, Elizabeth Haynes, Mark Dawson, Joanna Penn and more!
Interviews with authors about writing short fiction
Featuring short story and flash fiction writers, and editors.
How to write zines with simple tools
How to write zines with simple tools
The Three Words That Almost Ruined Me As a Writer: ‘Show, Don’t Tell’
When I learned “show, don’t tell,” I thought I’d discovered a guide that would never fail me. And sure, it was good for me, in the way training wheels help in learning to ride a bike. The directive…
Wes Anderson Explains How He Makes Films
For their series The Director's Chair, Studio Binder pulls together interviews with notable filmmakers to shine some light on how they make their films. In the latest installment, Wes Anderson explains how he writes and
Critique: 10 Ways to Write Excellent Dialogue
Because it's so important to take full of advantage of dialogue, let's take a look at a ten ways to write excellent dialogue.
The best podcasts about writing
Discover these fantastic podcasts for writing inspiration.
How to Be a Better Writer
Tips, tricks, and hard-won lessons: from creating drafts to working with editors.
“Closer to poetry”: the art of texting in novels
How millennial novelists are confronting the challenging of representing our text habits in fiction
How to Write Your Way Through the Middle
The hardest part of writing a novel is the middle. Here’s how to get through it.
5 Common Mistakes First-Time Novelists Make
Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Today, our sponsor Reedsy has put together a list of the most common mistakes for rookie novelists (Want more advice from Reedsy? Check out their webcast on writing and submitting query letters!):