Getting Past the Opening: Where to Start your Novel
Writing
How to write good dialogue
How to write good dialogue? Well, the rule is that your characters’ speech should always sound believable.
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!):
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.
“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 Be a Better Writer
Tips, tricks, and hard-won lessons: from creating drafts to working with editors.
The best podcasts about writing
Discover these fantastic podcasts for writing inspiration.
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!
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…
Janet Fitch's 10 rules for writers
How Long Does it Take to Write a Book?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Advice and techniques on the craft of writing
The Granta team share writing techniques and advice from their archives.
Is it okay to deface books for art?
In this week’s mailbag: Have you ever made an altered book?
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.
How to Write Flash Fiction in Four Steps
Learn to write engaging short fiction by ditching conflicts and resolutions
Don’t Write the Tedious Thing
I realized my book could focus on what I cared about most
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.
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.
Nine Things You Didn’t Know About the Semicolon
President Abraham Lincoln was a big fan: “it’s a very useful little chap.”
Staying Motivated Writing A Novel
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.
A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it
There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money
From tiny beginnings: how I start a novel « Nail Your Novel
Can you remember what you did when you started on the novel you’re working on? If you’ve finished more than one, do you have a way you like to prepare? Are they always the same or are they differen…
A lesson in teaching writing
Robert McCrum: I'm agnostic about the benefits of creative-writing classes, but would-be fictioneers could do worse than emulate the greats
How novels came to terms with the internet
We spend hours on the web, but you wouldn't know that from reading contemporary fiction. Novelists have gone to great lengths – setting stories in the past or in remote places – to avoid dealing with the internet. Is this finally changing, asks Laura Miller
In Writing, Progress Doesn’t Always Look Like Progress
It’s been sort of a perfect storm of late in terms of triggers leading me to think very hard about writing advice, writing processes, and progress in writing. Part of it is the discussion I h…
How to Write a Novel, Explained by a Booker Prize-Winning Novelist
No one taught DBC Pierre how to write, but that didn't stop him from winning the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel. In his new book—and here—he explains how you could do the same.
Ten rules for writing fiction
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts.