Links to resources for creative writing, self-publishing, entrepreneurship, worldbuilding, and language.

Characters

• The Nonverbal Dictionary (Archived)
  A dictionary with nonverbal behaviors, their psychological background and lots of sources.

• Abbie Emmons
  YouTube-videos for the beginning author on everything from world building to research to dialog.
• About.com Fiction Writing
  A site about creative writing, lots of articles, practical tips, competitions, and links.
• Advanced Fiction Writing
  Randy Ingermanson’s blog on creative writing.
• BetterNovelProject.com
  Analysis of novels and discussions about how bestselling authors like J.K. Rowling, Suzanne Collins among others have structured their novels.
• Bookfox
  YouTube channel with good advice on writing covering the more advanced topics but also with great examples.
• Colleen M. Story
  YouTube channel that is a great resource for going deeper into writing. It won’t necessarily tell you how to finish your first draft, but it will give you great advice on editing your WIP to the next level.
• DIY MFA – Do It Yourself Master of Fine Arts
  diymfa.com is a site showing how to create your own Master of Fine Arts.
• FARP – Writing Tutorials
  ”FARP – Fantasy Art and Resource Project” has a section with articles on creative writing.
• Helping Writers Become Authors
  A site that contains lots of articles on writing, focusing on novel structure, scene structure, and character arcs.
• “How to Write Your First Fantasy Novel in 2025 (Full Guide)“—a great YouTube video that goes through the writing process from first idea to final editing in just a bit over 2 hours. It is generic enough to work for any writing project, not just fantasy.
• Inside Creative Writing
  A podcast about creative writing.
• James Scott Bell
  Many books covering everything from story structure to dialog to voice.
• Jed Herne
  YouTube channel with a lot of in-depth writing advice with a tilt towards fantasy, but by no means limited to fantasy. Most advice can be used for all genres.
• Margie Lawson
  A psychologist and writing teacher with a focus on writing emotions.
• TV Tropes
  TVTropes.org is a catalog of ”tricks of the trade” for literature and movies.
• Wikihow’s Writing Category Page
  Wikihow has information on a lot of topics, such as writing.
• Writers Helping Writers—creative writing guides from emotional wounds to character traits to settings to conflicts.

Editing

• Writing And Editing: Five Problems to Avoid in Your First Novel

Structure

• Story Structure Database
  Lists the structure of hundreds of films and books, founded by the author K. M. Weiland.

• Internet Speculative Fiction Database
  ISFDB seems to be for books what IMDB is for movies and TV shows.
• readinglength.com
  How many words in a book? Find out by searching among this database’s more than 20 million titles.

Entrepreneurship

• Goinswriter.com
  Jeff Goins blogs about entrepreneurship and building a platform.
• Video course in building a platform
  Jeff Goins offers a free video course in three parts about entrepreneurship and how to build a platform.

Tools

• Reedsy Plot Generator
  Get help to come up with plots in genres like drama, fantasy, mystery, romance, and sci-fi.

• The Punctuation Guide
  How to use punctuation in English.
• Unified Verb Index (University of Colorado)

• Creating Fantasy and Science Fiction Worlds
  A series of articles on the subject of creating a fictional world. Covers theology, physics, weather, geology, botany, astronomy, calendars, biology, and anthropology.
• Creating Realistic Fantasy Animals
  ”10 Steps to Creating Realistic Fantasy Animals” describes, as the name suggests, how to create fantasy animals to inhabit a fantasy world.
• Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions
  A list of hundreds of questions to use as inspiration for building a fantasy world.
• Medieval Demographics Made Easy
  ”Medieval Demographics Made Easy – Numbers for Fantasy Worlds” describes the middle ages in numbers. How many butchers in a medieval village with 500 inhabitants?
• Outline of Culture – Wikipedias very thorough outline of culture can be used to get ideas or areas to cover when creating your own culture.
• Project Rho – 3D star maps
  Project Rho – 3D star maps for role-playing or SF.
• 7 deadly sins of worldbuilding – things to avoid when building a fictional world.

Earth – references

• moonconnection.com – moon phases from 1930 to 2024. fullmoon.info – calendar for full moons from 1900 to 2050. Lunar Calculator – manages most years, perhaps though not all kinds of calendars…

Names

• Behind the Name — the etymology and history of first names
• Kate Monk’s Onomastikon (Dictionary of Names)
  “This is a collection of names from around the world which was initially intended to help provide character names for live role-players.”

Sci-Fi

• Project Rho – Atomic Rockets – How to build your own hard-SF atomic rocket ship.
• Architect of Worlds – John. F. Zeiglers (GURPS Space) further work on star and planet generation.

Conlangs

• SCA2 – The Sound Change Applier 2 is a program that applies a set of sound changes to a lexicon.
• eSpeak text to speech – a compact open source software speech synthesizer for English and other languages, for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
• IPA Reader – translates IPA using several different voices for different languages.

General

• writingforums.org
  A discussion forum for creative writing covering most of the above topics.
• Hundreds of creative writing worksheets at eadeverell.com

Beta Readers

• betabooks.co
  Software for organizing beta readers with such features as access control, online reading on many devices, tracking reader progress and feedback handling. Here’s a very comprehensive comparison between BetaBooks and its largest competitor.
• betareader.io
  Like above. A bit less intuitive UI but has support for Swedish! 😀

Podcasts

• https://writingexcuses.com/

Authors

• https://jerryjenkins.com/