Top 13 writing resources and free courses

Melaina Barnes lists guides that might help if you are facing a blank page or are mired in the middle of a story.

Books on ‘how to write’

Becoming a Writer

Dorothea Brande

An oldie but a goodie. I got a copy after hearing Paul Abbott, one of my favourite TV writers, saying it’s the book he gives to beginning writers. It has a great list of questions you need to be willing to face up to if you’re a writer, such as, do you believe in God? and What is the greatest happiness you can imagine?

Write for Life

Nikki Jackowska

I borrowed this from the library because it had an endorsement from John Berger on the front cover. I’m glad I did. It has a psychoanalytic approach, and loads of imaginative exercises. There’s a reassuring analogy between writing and making chicken soup: every writer will make their own distinctive story even if they’re working with the same ingredients as every other writer.

Steering the Craft

Ursula Le Guin

I regularly dip into this for Le Guin’s meditation on narrative craft, and refusal to be pigeonholed, as well as a whistle stop tour of such delights as ‘being gorgeous’ with language and ‘crowding and leaping’ to balance vivid detail with momentum. It also has a useful guide to setting up a peer-to-peer writing group.

Free online courses and guides

Starting to Write – A Free 10 Lesson Course on Writing Short Stories

Toby Litt

The focused and imaginative exercises guide you through the writing process. The selection of readings is wonderful, and the continued exhortation to ‘DO THE READING!’ made me laugh out loud. I argued with some of the assertions about what a story needs. But we all need to develop our inner guide to how to write, and having an argument with yourself about what advice you’re willing to follow is part of the process.

How to Write a Book in 30 Days

Karen Wiesner for the Guardian

This was produced for NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month) in 2012. It’s really a guide to sketching out your novel, which, if you’re a planner you’ll love for its clarity and reassurance. If you’re not a planner, you’re probably not reading this list but, you know, writing your novel.

Hidden Meanings: Creative Fiction, Non-fiction, and Facts

The University of Iowa International Writing Program

A great selection of readings, and deceptively simple questions that prompt you to relate your stories or essays to philosophical ideas about ‘truthiness’. Resource packs for other writing MOOCs (mass online courses) are available from the same website.

The National Centre for Writing

This UK centre has a bunch of free resources on their website, including resource packs for early career writers and a world building course for sci-fi writers. There are also lots of lists of top tips.

Editing

How to Edit your Own Lousy Writing

Julian Gough

This essay in The Stinging Fly, also name-checked by Michael Langan in his Thoughts on Editing on our site, is a fantastic guide. It’s philosophical about the inevitable bad habits of writers. It has jokes. Read it.

Pitching and submitting

Curtis Brown blog

Short, sharp, professional advice on such things as writing a synopsis, researching agents, and submitting your work can be found on this blog, which promotes the literary agency’s writing courses.

Don’t Submit. Pitch

Laura Goode

A different take on how to pitch your work. And a realistic snapshot of the day jobs, difficulties and privileges a writer experienced before she got to the point of selling her work in the big bad capitalist world.

The writing life

the Paris Review — interviews with writers

Be careful not to fall down a rabbit hole here, as reading interviews with other writers about how, why and where they write is an addictive business. But allowing yourself to dip in to these conversations from the 1950s to the present day could help you to figure out why you’re drawn to some writers more than others.

Paul McVeigh blog

Regular signposting to a great personal selection of literary events, essays, short stories, writing tips and opportunities.

Literary Hub

Opinion pieces, essays, craft advice, reviews, podcasts, publishing news all gathered in one (US-focused) place. There’s a weekly newsletter you can subscribe to if you want a quick list of new content.