Resources for Writers

Books—and articles and websites and podcasts—about writing are a double-edged sword.

They instruct, imparting new skills and insights that improve your writing. They inspire, sparking ideas you scribble down, type, or dictate. They say, me too, reminding you that you’re not the only one walking this solitary and frustrating path, spending your days stringing together words that no one may ever want to read.

They also provide wonderful fodder for procrastination. If there’s always just one more book you have to read before you can write that novel, then you’ll never write it.

The resources below fall into three broad categories: the craft of writing, the business of writing (i.e., getting published), and the writing life. There is some overlap, as in Stephen King’s On Writing, which contains elements of all three, along with a memoir of his life as a writer.

On the following websites you’ll find articles in all three areas—craft, business, and the writing life:

The Craft of Writing

Writers continue to learn and grow throughout their writing lives. While there is no such thing as having learned the craft of writing, full stop, experienced writers are honing and refining their skills while writers near the beginning of their writing journey are still mastering the basics—story structure, characters and their arcs, realistic dialogue, a consistent narrative voice, and—most fundamental of all—the mechanics of writing.

The Basics

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style is the most concise overview of what every writer needs to know in terms of grammar, syntax, and punctuation. It’s only 105 pages so there’s really no excuse for not reading it. If you’re the “more is better” type, try The Chicago Manual of Style, which clocks in at 1144 pages. For a more entertaining overview of these things, read the “Toolbox” chapter of King’s On Writing, where he says that the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and dressing up your writing in big words is like dressing up your pet in evening clothes.

Story Structure

There are a lot of books on story structure, including Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, Shawn Coyne and Steven Pressfield’s The Story Grid, Robert McKee’s Story, and Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, which is an adaptation of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!, which was written for screenwriters. McKee’s book is also aimed at screenwriters, but the principles are useful for novelists.

You should read at least a couple of books on story structure, but don’t need to read all of these—and you shouldn’t, at least not all in the same three-month period, if you want to get any of your own writing done.

Characters and Emotion

In The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maass explores how to use story to elicit an emotional experience in readers. Maass, a longtime literary agent, ends each chapter with writing exercises designed to engage readers’ emotions.

Cron’s Story Genius is about character as much as it is about structure. Cron calls the protagonist’s inner struggle the third rail, the thing she has to has to learn or overcome in order to solve the external plot problem. Using Cron’s method, I planned out a novel and wrote the first draft in only five months. Full disclosure: I didn’t use all of Cron’s tools, didn’t make scene cards, but I used a lot of it, and plan to do so again with my next novel.

Jennie Nash, who was Lisa Cron’s book coach and whose own novel in progress Cron used as an example in Story Genius, put the same principles into a shorter format that a lot of writers find more user-friendly. This is the Inside Outline, a tool for outlining an entire novel in 2-3 pages—what happens in the most important scenes, why each scene matters to the protagonist, and how one scene leads organically to the next.

Revising

Tiffany Yates Martin’s Intuitive Editing lived up to its name, at least for me. The process she described—set the book aside to gain perspective, read it through in as close to one sitting as possible to get the big-picture overview, then a meticulous second reading, followed by editing the big things first, then the medium-sized, and only then line edits—was what I was already doing when I read it. But I found a lot I could use in Intuitive Editing, including so much helpful material on creating compelling characters that I could have listed this book in the previous section.

The Business of Writing

There are multiple paths to publication: one of the Big Five publishing houses, which means finding an agent; a small press, some of which accept unagented manuscripts; self-publishing; and hybrid publishing. The best concise overview I’ve found of the various avenues to publication is Jane Friedman’s Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published.

Good sites for indie (self-published) authors include the Reedsy Blog and The Creative Penn (indie writing guru Joanna Penn also has a podcast). Green-Light Your Book by Brooke Warner, founder of hybrid publisher She Writes Press, discusses the new publishing models that have begun to compete with traditional publishing.

Because traditional publishing is the path I’ve chosen, I know more about this avenue than any other. While I can certainly provide coaching and editing services to help indie writers produce a polished, ready-for-publication manuscript, I’m not the best source of information about getting that polished manuscript into the hands of readers.

Finding an Agent

If you want a major publishing house to publish your book, you need a literary agent. The most comprehensive list of agents is published annually in the Writer’s Market Guide to Literary Agents (2020 version published August 6, 2020).

Manuscript Wish List is a great online source with a searchable database that allows you to see which agents are looking for manuscripts like yours. The hashtag #MSWL on Twitter will yield a lot of tweets from agents asking for specific types of books.

Publishers Marketplace is another place to find agents online.

Checking the latest publishing news in Publshers Weekly will show you which agents are selling books to which publishers. Check the dedications of books in your genre to find who the author’s agent is, and then check their listings in Writer’s Market, Publishers Marketplace, or Manuscript Wish List.

Querying

Once you’ve got your short list of agents who are looking for the kind of book you’ve written, the next step is a query letter, usually accompanied by a synopsis and/or one or more opening chapters. Most agents accept email queries, but some use an online tool called Query Manager. Check the website carefully for requirements. Most agents want everything—even as many as three chapters—pasted right into the email, and will simply delete any email with attachments.

You can also gain an agent’s attention by a pitch event like #PitMad on Twitter. You tweet a 280-character pitch and if an agent “likes” the tweet, you’re invited to query. I did this in June 2020, and two of the agents who asked me to query subsequently asked for my full manuscript. I’ve also participated in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association’s agent pitch event, where four agents invited me to query. The WFWA event is open to members only, but anyone can participate in #PitMad, which takes place every March, June, September, and December.

Pitch Wars, the organization that sponsors #PitMad, has a terrific Writing Resources page with links to articles on how to write a query letter, a synopsis, or a Twitter pitch, and advice about the querying process generally.

At the bottom of the right sidebar on Michelle Hauck’s blog you’ll find a list of posts where literary agents discuss what they look for in query letters.

Query Shark is literary agent Janet Reid’s blog where she critiques query letters, sometimes two or three drafts of the same letter. Reading some of these queries will show you what not to do in yours.

Being Agented

Before you have an agent, getting one seems like the holy grail, but it’s only a step on the path. The agent still has to sell the book to a publisher, after which comes the contract, marketing the book, the financial aspects of writing income, and the pressure to produce the next book.

The best book I’ve found on the author’s journey is Courtney Maum’s Before and After the Book Deal. She looks at every step of the process from finishing the book through getting an agent, finding a publisher, negotiating the contract, dealing with the finances, marketing and promoting, and life as a published author.

The Writing Life

One of my favorite metaphors for writing comes from the preface of Anne’s Lamott’s Bird by Bird, in which she likens writing to the tea ceremony. We don’t need the ceremony for the caffeine, that is, for publication and material success. We need it for the ceremony itself, the process of creation. That is what nourishes us, not the product and where it may or may not land on the bestseller list. She explains why perfectionism is the enemy of good writing, that before something is any good, it has to start as a “shitty first draft” that we write with real emotion at its center—vulnerable, pushing past the fear of how you will appear to others.

According to David Bayles in Art and Fear, artists have two kinds of fears: fears about yourself, which prevent you from doing your best work, and fears about your reception by others, which keep you from doing your own work. Bayles warns—wisely—that you have a choice between giving your creative work your best shot and risking that it won’t make you happy, or not doing it and guaranteeing that it won’t.

In Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says that discipline—”battling yourself with guilt, accusations, and strong-arm threats”—won’t help you write, and offers concrete suggestions for escaping “the endless cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure” that lead to procrastination and writer’s block.

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way is a program for clearing writer’s block through exercises designed to replenish the depleted creative well. It’s a little on the woo-woo side, but I found some of the exercises helpful, including one I thought might kill me—a week-long reading fast. Was that even possible? I had to read work emails and documents, but for seven days I didn’t read anything for pleasure. For the first five, I was climbing the walls. For the last two, I wrote more than I ever have in a 48 hour period.

To the question some writers ask, Do you know how old I’ll be by the time I publish a novel? Cameron’s answer is, the same age you’ll be if you don’t.

Steven Pressfield’s, The War of Art is an attack on Resistance (which he always writes with a capital R, as though it were a demon the writer battles with the aid of the Muse) which takes hold when procrastination becomes habit.

Resistance feels like hell. A low-grade misery pervades everything. There’s guilt but we can’t put our finger on the source. We feel unloved, unlovable. We’re disgusted. We hate our lives, hate ourselves. When it becomes unendurable, vices kick in: drinking, adultery, web surfing.

Sound familiar? So, as much as I’d love for you to continue exploring my website, if you do it for too long or at the expense of your writing, it really is one of those vices Pressfield’s talking about. So bookmark the site—or better yet, subscribe to blog updates—and then shut down your browser, open your work in progress document, and WRITE.

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