Writing Resources: Pub(lishing) Crawl

This is my third post in a series where I talk about my favourite writing resources, whether it be websites, books, blogs or author newsletters. Previously I talked about Susan Dennard's Misfits & Daydreamers as well as the podcast Writing Excuses. This week (um, not that this is weekly. I'm not organised like that) I'm talking about one of my favourite writing websites.

PUB(LISHING) CRAWL

Pub(lishing) Crawl is a fantastic website run by a group of writers and industry professionals. Erin Bowman, Susan Dennard, Kat Zhang, Vanessa Di Gregorio, Julie Eshbaugh, Hannah Fergesen, Stephanie Garber, S. Jane-Jones, Stacey Lee, Biljana Likic, Jodi Meadows, E.C Myers, Rachel Siegel and Joanna Volpe make up the team, with past contributors including Sarah J Maas, Leigh Bardugo and Alex Bracken just to name a few. If you don't recognise at least some of those names, I'll be surprised.

Over the years some of the contributors have gone from aspiring/debut authors to NYT bestsellers, so the hundreds of posts they have written about writing are definitely worth checking out. They all have years of experience in their own fields, and the writers know what it's like to be a struggling aspiring writer as well as a successful published author.

I first found Pub Crawl when I found out that one of my all time favourite authors, Sarah J Maas, used to be a contributor. Then I found out that so many of my favourites write/have written for the website, and then there was no going back. It's such an invaluable resource, especially because the contributors come from all sides of the industry. Writing Excuses (which I talked about last time) is just by authors and whilst it's an invaluable resource, hearing advice from agents and publishers is great.

Because of the amount of contributors and the length of time the website has been up, there are posts on anything and everything you could hope for. Whatever problem you have, just run a keyword through the search. To give you an example a while ago I was having trouble creating my villain, and in total there were seven pages worth of articles to look through. There are also five pages tagged with outlining, and three on character creation.

Here are just a few of my favourite articles:

Outlining on Excel (yes that's right...Excel)

Cheap Villain Killin'

The Tyrant Villain

Secondary Characters

A Conversation Between Critique Partners: Worldbuilding

Writing Resources: Writing Excuses

You may have seen a post I did about a week ago in which I said that I was going to spend some time talking about my favourite writing resources, whether it be websites, books, blogs or author newsletters (last week I talked about Susan Dennard's Misfits & Daydreamers which you can find here). Because I'm an unorganized human being I can't promise that these posts will be weekly (or regular, for that matter), but this week I really want to talk about one of my favourite resources. And that is....

*starts drumroll* 

WRITING EXCUSES

Writing Excuses is fabulous. It's a free writing advice podcast by a bunch of really successful and talented authors: Howard Tayler, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal and Brandon Sanderson. You hay have heard of them before. Occasionally, they also bring in special guests such as Pat Rothfuss (!!!). Although its primarily focussed on science fiction and fantasy, there are ten seasons of podcasts so I'd recommend checking it out no matter what genre you write in. Episodes cover practically anything you'd want to know from secondary world creation to a Q&A on story structure.

Each episode is only fifteen minutes long and features a book of the week as well as a writing prompt at the end. You can tell that the hosts genuinely enjoy themselves because of the laugh out loud moments, but aside from that the advice is just fantastic. The talent of the authors creating the podcast makes my brain melt.

The best thing about them is that you can download/listen to Writing Excuses for free. I have a bunched of them saved onto my phone for whenever I get bored on public transport or something (you can tell that I'm a really cool person, can't you?).

The main way to get better at writing is to practice, but Writing Excuses is so helpful for a writer no matter how experienced you are. For example, recently I've been wondering if my main character in my current novel is a bit flat compared to the supporting cast. So, I looked through the archives and found a podcast on the topic. Although they obviously can't tell you exactly what the problem with your character is, they said that generally to make your main character more interesting you need to make sure the reader knows what the character wants more than anything, to give them a life/hobbies/interests outside the novel, and to give them agency. These things might not make me a better writer, but it certainly helps making my characters better.

In my own humble opinion, Writing Excuses is one of the best resources out there. It's easy to cram into your day to day life yet the advice is invaluable.

There are a lot of episodes, and whilst I'd say that all of the ones I've listened to have been of good quality, some are more helpful than others. I'm going to link you to a few of my favourites here:

Q&A On Character
Worldbuilding Wilderness
Worldbuilding History
Polytheism in Fiction
When Good Characters Go Bad
Q&A At Dragons & Fairytales
Trunk Novels
What Do You Mean, My Main Character Is Boring?