In an attempt to provide the DeviantArt writing community with useful information, advise, and tools, we here at NaNoPlotMo have decided to begin what will be an ongoing series of featured resources from around DA and the internet at large. We may even suggest actual, physical books!


To kick things off, I'd like to recommend an article and podcast from theminimalists.com titled 11 Ways to Write Better. It's short and sweet, and I've found all eleven suggestions to be incredible useful from personal experience. They are:


The podcast is also great and goes into a lot more details while providing even more awesome resources. If you have a commute or like to listen to podcasts while you do other things, I definitely recommend listening to here: Podcast 18: Writing.

In addition to advice on writing, The Minimalists have a great website with lots of tools to help you minimize the distractions in your life and focus on your goals, creative or otherwise. Their advice helped me become more productive and focus on writing every day. I highly recommend checking out their site and listening to their podcasts! 

Related Resources

How to Improve Your Writing Style
While I’ve written articles about writing style in the past, they were designed mostly to define what style is and didn’t provide much help for improvement. This article contains some practical tips I’ve discovered that will actually help you improve your style and hopefully provide a foundation for why good style matters. I believe good style is important for many reasons, but mostly because I want my readers to feel like the time they spent with my story was worthwhile, pleasant, and maybe even a little enlightening.
“All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction.” – Steve Almond 
“Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.” – Kurt Vonnegut 
1) Be clear. 
“To be clear is the first duty of a writer; to charm and to please are graces to be acquired later  How to Write a First Draft Without PerfectionismMaybe you’ve heard that first drafts are supposed to suck, but what does that really mean? What does a sucky first draft look like? How do you allow yourself to suck? Why would you even want to allow yourself to write something that sucks in the first place?
Because otherwise, you’ll most likely be crippled by the writer’s arch nemesis: perfectionism.
Did you just cringe? We all experience it when we sit down to write, arrange everything just so, type a sentence or two (or a bit more if you’re lucky), and then it strikes—your inner editor. It smacks you across the face and demands that you fix that grammar mistake right now. 
Or worse, you’ve written multiple chapters of your epic novel when you suddenly get a great idea for a new direction to take the story that will make it so much better! But you can’t just keep writing as if you’d written in that awesome new idea from the beginning. No, your inner editor screams at

Suggest a Resource

Know of other great resources we should feature? What tools do you use in your writing process that could benefit other writers? Let us know in the comments below or send us a note with your suggestions, and we'll feature you and the resources you share!