Writing Resources

Some of my favorite writing websites:

Craft Resources

• YA Highway

• The Narrative Breakdown (It’s a podcast.)

• Publishing Crawl

• Cockeyed Caravan

• Fiction University

• Helping Writers Become Authors

• World Photography Organisation has tons of photos to get your creative juices flowing

• Writing for Theater and Film (recently suggested to me by an enterprising young screenwriter!)

Finding an Agent

• Query Shark is maintained by literary agent Janet Reid, is a great resource for writers who want to hone their query-writing skills.

• Ask the Agent is maintained by literary agent Jennifer Laughran. Everything you ever wanted to know about the publishing industry from querying to going on sub, to royalties, to movie deals.

• Query Tracker is a great resource for finding agents, checking out their stats (typical response times, rough ratio of Yesses to Nos, etc.) and keeping track of your own query process.

• Manuscript Wish List is a fun website where agents and editors can post their “wish lists” for books they wish they could see in their inboxes.

• Pitch Wars: You’ll need a Twitter account for this one, but occasionally they have what are called pitch contests where prospective authors can pitch their manuscripts with a hashtag agents/editors/volunteer mentors search the hashtag to look for books they might be interested in.

Reading

• I’m here. I’m queer. What the hell do I read?

• The Daily Dahlia

• This page of The Daily Dahlia (specifically, resources for writing literature from diverse perspectives)

• The Poetry Foundation

• Book Riot

• Here’s a quick writing activity: Go to photo A, B, C, or D and list all your detailed observations, reasonable inferences and sensory details, and imagined details. Then freewrite from there. If you feel like it, revise to punch up your verbs and nouns.

• For something a little more wilder, check out this, this, or this, but remember to stay observant!