Category:Writing

This section contains information about the act of writing, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, UX or Design or something else. For literature, poetry, etc. see Category: Reading

Writing advice

• I have been trying to write for a while now.... Q&A with Neil Gaiman

Ideas

• Writing idea generation
• Stories we've seen too often at Strange Horizon
• Horror stories we've seen too often at Strange Horizon

Research

• Wikipedia -- And if you're not giving money to Wikipedia for the work you're getting from Wikipedia, you're part of the problem.
• Green's Dictionary of Slang

Story Structure

• Story Structure

The hard bits: the actual words

• Web Copy Writing Techniques

Naming things

• Name Generators

Editing, Business, and Selling

• Beta Readers
• William Shunn: Manuscript Format - for short stories
• What I've learned from slush reading at Podcastle - everything from cover letters to titles to ways to stay out of the rejection pile
• Confessions of a slush reader: why should I care? - how to help the reader give a damn about your story
• Zen in the art of short fiction titling by John Joseph Adams, who many in the field have told me is the best titler in science fiction
• The truth about short story titles by Neil Clarke
• The top 10 most common short story names at Clarkesworld
• Adventures in Editing in which Cat Valente goes off about boring first paragraphs
• Self Editing 4 Fiction is 8+ articles on how to do your own editing
• Things I wish I knew before my book came out by Mallory O'Meara
• Writer Beware - a resource for keeping up with what publishers are playing fast and loose with the "rules" of good business practice.
• How to write a proper short story cover letter

Tools

Tools I use

• Apple Pages
• Microsoft Word
• 750 words, which challenges you to write just 750 words a day
• LitReactor is a writing community and classroom

Tools I haven't tried

• After the Deadline promises to be a better spellchecker and grammar checker. I haven't tried it but it does have a demo section on the site.
• Hemingway App is a much-loved product for looking at your writing style, detecting things like weak verbs, complex words, and other things that make your writing harder to read. It includes a reading level calculator.
• Readable is another product I haven't tried, but it appears to do roughly the same things as After the Deadline and Hemingway.
• Wonderdraft is a fictional map creator.