I spent hours and hours googling writing resources to help me improve my craft, figure out what a query was, and more. So I decided to put all the resources I used together to save aspiring writers some time. Below is a non-exhaustive list that I hope you find helpful.

Let’s Start with Craft Books

Below is a list of books that helped me hone my craft and taught me skills I could transfer into my own stories.

• The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression (2nd Edition)
  • One of the biggest struggles for writers is how to convey emotion to readers in a unique and compelling way. When showing our characters’ feelings, we often use the first idea that comes to mind, and they end up smiling, nodding, and frowning too much. If you need inspiration for creating characters’ emotional responses that are personalized and evocative, this ultimate show-don’t-tell guide for emotion can help.
• The Emotional Craft Of Fiction By Donald Maass
  • Topics covered include emotional modes of writing, beyond showing versus telling, your story’s emotional world, moral stakes, connecting the inner and outer journeys, plot as emotional opportunities, invoking higher emotions, symbols, and emotional language, cascading change, story as emotional mirror, positive spirit and magnanimous writing, the hidden current that makes stories move.
• Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel: The Ultimate Guide to Writing a YA Bestseller By Jessica Brody
  • This book presents a comprehensive story structure guide for anyone who wants to write a young adult novel by applying the famed Save the Cat! screenwriting methodology to the world of YA fiction. 
• Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View By Jill Elizabeth Nelson
  • This handbook shows you how to perform the transformation from ordinary narrative to deep narrative in clear, easy-to-master steps.
• Creating Character Arcs by K.M. Weiland 
  • This book will help you achieve memorable and moving character arcs in every book you write.

Now Onto Writing & Editing Resources

Save The Cat beats broken down by Award Winning Author Liselle Sambury

In Sambury’s videos she breaks down Save the Cat beats and shows you how they work in her stories and how you can use them in your own.

Deep POV broken down by Author S. Kaeth

What is Deep POV? Deep POV creates a scenario that puts the reader in the point-of-view character’s head, riding along with everything they’re thinking, feeling, etc.

S. Kaeth does a great job breaking down deep POV and how it can be used in your story.

Resources from Editor Jeni Chappelle

Jeni created an incredible resource, Harness Your Inner Editor Drafting 2.0, to help see self-editing in a new way, give some tools to evaluate your writing with more clarity, and reduce the number of times you have to reread your first draft. This resource is invaluable. Not only is this available for free, but she has many other resources on her site.

Another is her Big Scary List of Filter and Filler Words. This document is
intended to be used as a guide to help you find weak writing and tighten your text, and it’s especially helpful if you need to cut your manuscript’s word count by a couple thousand words.

Stakes Map

Creating a stakes map can let you get a bird’s eye view on stakes and pacing, move stuff around to fix problems, and make changes to up the stakes where needed. Melissa Caruso explains this process really well in her blog about stakes mapping. I highly recommend trying this process out on your own book.

Inclusive Resources

These resources are here to help ensure your writing is inclusive while being authentic.

• Writing With Color
  • This resource educates and provides great examples. Be sure to take some time to read through it.
• Intentional Craft: Writing Outside Your Lived Experience
  • This foundational course addresses how to respectfully and responsibly write characters of different races, ethnicities, gender identities and expressions, sexual orientations, disabilities, and neurodiversities.
• Author Sydney Langford
  • They discuss Disability Pride Month, how to be a better ally, and what phrases can be harmful within your stories.
• List of terms that would be good to avoid
  • Remember to use language that emphasizes accessibility and try to familiarize yourself with harmful tropes.

Story Structure Resources

There are many different story structure resources, but here are a few videos and podcasts to help fine tune and learn more about character arcs, story structure, and more.

• Dan Wells on Story Structure
• The Seven Layer Plot Dip by Turning To Story
• Shorter Turning To Story podcast episodes

Paid Resources

• The Writer’s Roadmap
• The Writer’s Conservatory
• Susan Dennard’s Writing Academy

But What Happens After Editing?

There are a number of paths you can take after edits and after you have found a few trusty people to give you feedback. One of those paths is traditional publishing. If you choose to go down the traditional publishing route you need to create a query letter and synopsis before you can query agents*.

Query Letter and Synopsis Resources

So this is where I wanted to introduce one of my favorite resources for understanding and writing a great query letter: Query101.

This website is dedicated to helping writers understand how to craft a query, show examples of successful query letters, provide resources about queries, and more.

Query Shark is another great resource.

Query101’s website even includes an article about how to create a perfect synopsis.

Writing Community

Another important aspect of writing is building a community. This can be by applying to programs like Write Team Mentorship Program, Write Mentor, Quillers Mentorship Program, Revise and Resub, and DVPit (to name a few). These programs aim to support writers through mentorships, pitch contests, and more. They also provide resources like webinars and Q & As to help them succeed.

Even if you don’t get into the mentorship part of these programs, the community you build from participating in the events leading up to the mentee announcements can be invaluable. I have found some wonderful friendships from participating in these early events.

This is certainly not an exhaustive list. There are plenty of other resources out there, but the goal of this post is to help you get started and compile some resources that were incredibly helpful to me.

*Need help finding the right agent? These sites can help:

• QueryTracker
• Association of American Literary Agents
• Manuscript Wish List