FOR WRITERS
For many months in 2017-18 my dear friend and fabulous Pitch Wars co-mentor, M.K. England, and I hosted a live stream about books, writing, writers, and much more. Sadly tech troubles after one of us moved deep into a rural area has slowed us down a bit, but here are some old episodes. Hopefully we’ll be up and running again soon!
Episode 21: Begin as You Mean to Go On- Getting Focused and Re-dedicating to Writing
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Episode 20: Setting Goals for Reading and Writing
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Episode 19: Best Books of 2017 + 2018 YA preview
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Episode 18: Expert Worldbuiling Tips with YA Fantasy author Margaret Owen
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Episode 17: Getting Deeper Into Your Characters with YA author Leigh Mar
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Episode 16: Character Interiority — Digging Deep Into POV
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Episode 15: Being Happy for Others Even When It Sucks
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Episode 14: Agent Offers, The Call, and Hard Decisions with YA author Leigh Mar
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Episode 13: Fast Drafting Tips for NaNoWriMo (or anytime!)
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Episode 12: Worldbuilding, Part 2 (Start-to-Finish #6)
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Episode 10: Story Structure (Project Start-to-Finish #4) with YA fantasy author Joan He
Episode 9: Books that Shaped Us
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Episode 8: Creating Characters (Project Start-to-Finish #3)
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Episode 8: An (excellent) Chat with MG/YA Author Cindy Baldwin
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Episode 6: The Messy Transition Period before Starting a New Project (Project Start-to-Finish #2)
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Episode 5: Choosing Your Next Idea (Project Start-to-Finish #1)
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Episode 4: Geek Out with Rena Barron
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Episode 3: Pitch Wars Retrospective
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For General Brilliance and Insight on Character Creation
These are the absolute must-read craft posts that I go back to again and again (not a few of which are written by my friends.*grins*). Note: I’ve borrowed some of this with permission from M.K. England‘s list of resources for writers.
Plot and Structure
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Story by Robert McKee
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Plot and Structure by James Scott Bell
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Story Engineering by Larry Brooks
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Story Engineering Structure Cheat Sheet by Larry Brooks
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I also LOVE K.M. Weiland’s posts on structure and use them often
Characterization and Craft
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Getting into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors by Brandilyn Collins
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Deep Point of View by Marcy Kennedy
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Cindy Baldwin’s series on writing description
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How to Avoid Telling in Writing Fiction
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Conquering Six Enemies of Deep POV
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This sentence has five words — A super fast lesson on sentence variety and rhythm.
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Writing Smooth Transitions
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Show Don’t Tell series by Rebecca McLaughlin — She posts bad excerpts from her own writing and walks us through the revision.
Everything Resources
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The Ultimate Collection of Resources for Writers on PublishingCrawl
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Tools for Writers: Worksheets and more from the authors of The Emotion Thesaurus
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The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein
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Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass (From DMLA Literary Agency. There are a million editions, so buy the most recent one. The workbook is great, too)
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Understanding Show, Don’t Tell: And Really Getting It by Janice Hardy
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GMC: Goal, Motivation, Conflict by Debra Dixon
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Anything by K.M. Weiland
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After the First Chapter blog series by Amanda Rawson Hill
Podcasts
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Publishing Crawl (PubCrawl)
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LiteratiCast (with agent Jennifer Laughran)
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Print Run (with agents Laura Zats and Erik Hane)
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Writing Excuses
