Hey Week 5 and you’re hitting the hump aren’t you? I can feel it. I get to this point also. It’s where the adrenaline of the initial idea is wearing off and you’re starting to find conjuring drama difficult and writing is hard and it’s just easier to muck about on the internet, and the book you’re reading is making you think, I am terrible, everything I do is terrible, I’ll never be as good as this, and you’re ready to junk it in.

How long does it take to write a book? Stephen King says writing a book should take no more than three months—and this author discovered he's right.

President Abraham Lincoln was a big fan: “it’s a very useful little chap.”

Get your work recognized: write a brag document

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.

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…

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.

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.

In this week’s mailbag: Have you ever made an altered book?

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.

When it comes to writing the “other,” what questions are we not asking?

The Granta team share writing techniques and advice from their archives.

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.

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 …

50,000 words isn't an arbitrary number

Do yourself a favor and read these 10 pieces of advice first.

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-…

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.

No, it will not be easy. Yes, it will be rewarding. (Eventually.)

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.

The author of Testament, which won the Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award 2019, shares the story of her creative journey

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 guides, podcasts and interviews about writing. Featuring Margaret Atwood, Nicci French, Tim Clare, Elizabeth Haynes, Mark Dawson, Joanna Penn and more!

Featuring short story and flash fiction writers, and editors.

How to write zines with simple tools

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…

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

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.

Discover these fantastic podcasts for writing inspiration.