WRITERS RESOURCE LIST

Tools, tips and tricks to improve your writing.

Moderator: Editors

Post Reply
User avatar
Lester Curtis
Long Fiction Editor
Posts: 2736
Joined: January 11, 2010, 12:03:56 AM
Location: by the time you read this, I'll be somewhere else

WRITERS RESOURCE LIST

Post by Lester Curtis »

HELPFUL LINKS FOR WRITERS
______________________________
--------------------------------
NOTE: I try to list things here that are all free, but you can spend money at some of these sites. If you're on a budget, use up all the free stuff first.

I've given a few words of description to some of these, but not all.
_______________________
-----------------------
REFERENCES
(and reference-like things)
_______________________
-----------------------
A truly exhaustive free online style manual
http://stylemanual.natgeo.com/
---------------------------------
http://phrontistery.info/
-----------------------------
https://www.etymonline.com/
-----------------------------
http://www.dailywritingtips.com/
------------------------
Some of the best explanations I've found for tricky grammar questions

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-girl
--------------------------
A reverse dictionary/thesaurus--type in the definition and it gives you a list of words to fit.

http://www.onelook.com/?w=entersearchhe ... vfp_legacy
----------------------------
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
------------------------------------
http://www.affixes.org/
-------------------------------
This will show you how to draw family trees, so you can keep track of your characters' extended families. If you're writing a novel, you'll probably need this.

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/ ... fund2.html
----------------------------------
https://www.timeanddate.com/
--------------------------
My thanks to Bill Wolfe for this. He sent it to me as part of a merciless criticism of a scene I wrote about FTL travel.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/cship.html#shuttle
---------------------------
Because it's good to know your way around the neighborhood.

http://galaxymap.org/
-------------------------
Comparative sizes of a great many things.

http://htwins.net/scale2/?bordercolor=white
--------------------------------
A NASA app for exploring the Solar system

http://eyes.nasa.gov/index.html
--------------------------------
Song lookup

http://www.musipedia.org/
----------------------------
Maps of some explored Solar system worlds--I've used the one for Mars, and it's stunning.

https://astrogeology.usgs.gov/maps/Plan ... and-Globes
--------------------------------------------------
Fantasy worldbuilding, taken to the extreme:

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/08/fantasy-wor ... questions/
---------------------------------------------------
Courtesy of none other than NASA, a brief glossary:

https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/SFTerms.html
-----------------------------
_____________________________________
-------------------------------------
WRITING INSTRUCTION
____________________________
----------------------------
LOTS of stuff here; focus is on immersion. I recommend signing up for the "Immerse or Die" reports. You get to see just how annoying tiny details can be to picky readers.

http://creativityhacker.ca
--------------------------
Heavy emphasis on story structure; other good stuff too

https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/
---------------------------
Various; look over the front page.

http://www.livewritethrive.com/
-------------------------------
Loaded with excellent resources

http://writershelpingwriters.net/writing-tools/
--------------------------------
Write, edit, publish

http://www.thecreativepenn.com/
---------------------------
Fairly solid basic advice

http://www.caroclarke.com/writing.html
-------------------------
A delightful short course in F&SF

http://www.writesf.com/
-----------------------------
Please, no Mary Sues ...

http://www.springhole.net/writing/whatisamarysue.htm
---------------------------------
Turkey City Lexicon--some things editors don't like to see--again

http://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/turkey-city ... workshops/
-----------------------------

Orson Scott Card's website; specifically, his writing class:

http://www.hatrack.com/writingclass/index.shtml
-----------------------------

EDUCATION
Online courses on all kinds of topics, many free.

The reason I'm including this is to point you to a rich resource for writers' research. I've taken a number of these courses (all free) as research for my own novel. Anthropology, astrobiology, evolution, solar-system formation--you get the idea. Much more depth than you can get from a Wiki search. Plus, it's just fun and gratifying to learn new things.

https://www.class-central.com/
------------------------------

Academic media you can browse for free.

Research helps you to convey believability in your work.

https://archive.org/
-------------------------------------
_______________________________
------------------------------
GET YOUR WORK CRITIQUED
____________________________
-----------------------------
This is the site I use, and I've gotten the most useful crits here. You critique others' work for credit and have yours critiqued in return.

http://critique.org/
__________________________
---------------------------
SOFTWARE
__________________________
---------------------------
A bombproof text editor with some remarkable capabilities. If you *must* use the "nuclear option" to clean hidden junk code from text files, this does it, but it also strips formatting (italics, bold, etc.). Written for people who write code for a living.

Why would you need this? If you decide to self-publish an e-book, you can format it yourself for all the major e-reader file types, but your manuscript MUST be scrubbed completely free of word-processor artifacts, and not all text-editors will do this. I have reason to believe that Microsoft WordPad and NotePad both leave artifacts in what should be clean plain-text (.txt) files. This doesn't.

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
----------------------------
I was raised by humans. What's your excuse?
Post Reply

Return to “Writers Workshop”