Books
Self-Editing
for Fiction Writers by Browne and King
Written by professional editors with plain, straightforward advice
about the mistakes that newbie writers make at the word/sentence level
and how to clean the amateurishness out of your language. IMO should be
read by absolutely everyone who wants to write professionally.
Written by an agent, describes how to turn boring, self-absorbed fiction of the type that I'm inclined to write into stories that readers might actually want to read. Even though the book focuses on novels, I give Maas credit for the insights that helped me finally start to publish short fiction.
Wonderbook by Vandermeer
A good starter book for people who are thinking about creative writing but don't think they're creative. Talks a lot about understanding the creative process.
Wired for Story by Cron
Bills
itself as a book combining writing advice and evolutionary psychology,
but for me this book was invaluable for the nuts-and-bolts techniques
for how to draw readers into the emotional state of the character and
how to communicate emotional stakes.
Story by McKee
Widely
seen as the Bible of screenplay writing, this book changed the way that
I thought about structuring scenes and how scenes are organized into
character arcs and how the character story works. Also describes a good
method of outlining using index cards that I've found useful.
Workshops
Online Writing Workship for Science Fiction, Fantasy
and Horror
http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/
For a nominal annual fee, this workshop puts you in touch with other people
seriously trying to improve their writing. Read stories, send your critiques,
post your own stories, get critiques from other writers.
Critters Writers Workshop
http://www.critters.org/index.ht
Similar to OWW, but free and not as flexible in scheduling. The quality
of the critiques is pretty variable, but you get a lot of them.
Copyright 2012 Tom Greene