Writing Guides That I Love

These writing guides sit on my desk. I regularly consult these five texts when working on projects, and I also use them (among a few others) in the classroom.    

Are you starting a big project like a novel or a non-fiction book?    

If so, I highly recommend Baty, Grant an Stewart-Streit’s workbook Ready, Set, Novel. This book comes out of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)—have you ever participated?    

I’ve never been able join in because November is a busy time in the teaching year, but I do know writers that have produced a first draft during NaNoWriMo. As a painfully slow writer, I don’t think it would be possible for me to draft an entire novel in such a short time, but that’s where this book comes in.   

I’ve been working through the exercises in Ready, Set, Novel in my own order and at my own pace. I haven’t been following the guide exactly, but I open it up and complete an exercise when I’m feeling stuck. The exercises are geared toward asking key questions—many of which are character focused.   

For instance, the ‘Family Tree’ page explains that “understanding your main character can be easier if you know his family history.” I don’t know about you, but I likely wouldn’t be this organized on my own—I think it’s a neat idea and it did help me to dig a little deeper into my protagonist’s backstory in order to write from a place of knowledge. While you could easily make a family tree in your own notebook, I think it’s nice to have something so graphic. This guide has also helped me to organize all of my pre-writing materials in one place.   

Another section that I found particularly useful was the pages dedicated to character profiling. The guide encourages you to “fill out… character profiles for as many or as few of the players in your story as you like.” I completed this section for my main characters. Again, filling out these pages has helped me to better understand each character, which, in turn, allows me to know how they may interact with one another (and other things like what their motivations may be). 

There are quite a few pages that are just lined notepaper, which I have been using to remember websites I’ve visited while researching, or write quick notes like “the sun sets in August in Alberta at 10:54 p.m.” or ones like “red ruler” that I can’t always decipher later (ha!).   

What writing guides do you recommend?