Writing Resources for the online writer!
Introduction
Reading and writing speculative fiction is my passion, a passion I know many in the Reach Your Apex community share. My path into creative writing has been mostly self-taught, with my educational background in physical science. With web resources, we have a more accessible means of studying, at our own pace, where we otherwise might not have the opportunity to. Technology and communities (like Reach Your Apex) are high-quality resources available to a wider scope of people at varying stages of their writing journey. It is an honor to share some of my favorite free web resources with you.
In this essay, I include a cursory survey of each website’s features, how I personally use them in parallel to my writing practice, and some related media suggestions.
Writing Resources – OneLook Thesaurus
The OneLook Thesaurus is a flexible alternative to a standard thesaurus, allowing for search prompts by “word, phrase, description, or pattern.” This function allows for ease of use, and is a quick way to find words that may be on the tip of one’s tongue. Among its filters include sorting by “most modern”, “oldest”, “meter”, or even, “most funny-sounding”. It organizes information in “concept clusters” and may be applied as a tool for brainstorming or connecting ideas.
I often pair this resource with the Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries in order to qualify its relationship within the specific context and voice of the story. While it is a useful tool for word-finding, it may not account for textual nuance. I prefer using this tool for finding words and phrases I am already familiar with.
Writing Resources – BHL: Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) “is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives.” It hosts archival scans for a wide array of topics, which may be organized by collection.
Among my favorite collections are “Monsters are Real” and “Objects of Wonder”. Some archived material may cover information at the intersection of art and science—for example, Shakespeare plays and their plants, or sea creatures and their fables. Other archived material include travel logs, observations, and reflections. (A wide selection of Thoreau and similar essays!)
The BHL also contains non-English resources, and the scans have a search function that allows for page-jumping, or a quick survey of the text. Some materials may have OCR (machine-generated texts) or manual transcriptions available for visual and functional accessibility.
Paired with a website like JSTOR, or a local library’s resources, these tools may allow for deeply researching a speculative element, adding rigor to world-building, or satisfying a general curiosity.
Writing Resources – LitHub: The Craft of Writing
“The Craft of Writing” is a Literary Hub newsletter that focuses on “craft and advice for writers of every level.” Among these are excerpts, interviews, and essays such as “Toni Morrison on Breathing Life into Clichés” and “Matthew Salesses on Writing Plot and Cultural Context”. The website includes useful tags at the bottom of the page for exploring similar topics.
Their email newsletter sends a short essay or excerpt every Wednesday, with their website containing past dispatches for those who would like to explore their archives. I find these essays informative, encouraging, and accessible to writers on different stages in learning their craft. I also enjoy LitHub’s other related resources—new releases, opinion pieces, biographies, and literary history.
Writing Resources – Writing the Other: Resources
Writing the Other is a website that expands upon the information from Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward’s book “Writing the Other: A Practical Approach”. Their website has a strong focus on “cultures outside of their own and/or include characters whose gender, sexual preference, race, or other major identity differs significantly from their own.” I find that it is a useful starting point for hearing others critically explore and unpack narrative decisions.
Their curated web resources are free (with more resources offered to students who have previously attended their workshops) and include a wide variety of web essays, interviews, and podcasts, with internal and external links to further explore topics. These are helpfully categorized according to sections such as: “Writing Characters of Different Races and Ethnicities”, “Writing Characters With Disabilities”, and “Writing Characters With Different Sexual Orientations”.
These web resources are a helpful starting point, yet I also agree with Brandon Taylor’s emphasis on “Empathy As Craft” (“There is No Secret to Writing About People Who Do Not Look Like You”). I encourage my fellow writers to continue reading widely, both fiction and nonfiction, to explore the nuance of identity and character. The practice of developing characters has been a heuristic in expanding my own perspective. To quote George Saunders from his essay collection on Russian short fiction “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain”, on “inequitable narration”:
“I’d say there’s a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of other writer’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.”
The curated web resources from Writing the Other have been helpful for finding similar websites that may challenge some of my narrative biases, and thus supporting better-developed characters.
Writing Resources – Speculative Literature Foundation: Deep Dives
The Speculative Literature Foundation’s “Deep Dives” series is a collection of web interviews by speculative fiction writers and editors. The interviews marked “charted” contain free learning modules, and discussion questions with a focus on speculative fiction. Some of the charted interviews include “Nalo Hopkinson on using vernacular speech in storytelling” and “George R. R. Martin on the importance of fact in science fiction”.
I’ve hosted sessions with friends where we would group-watch, discuss the questions, and try out the writing exercises. The website is designed to make peer-lead discussion accessible. I have listened through the interviews and attempted writing exercises on my own, but I believe these are best done with a writing group or a partner. Processing the discussion is much more fun and engaging with peer perspectives.
The Speculative Literature Foundation also offers the podcast “Mohanraj and Rosenbaum Are Humans”, and it is one of my favorite speculative fiction resources, as they interview many of my favorite authors and editors.
Conclusion
While I find these web resources helpful, I believe that raw information on its own cannot be an adequate substitute for the wisdom developed through the practice of writing and reading. Instead, I believe that web resources are valuable auxiliary tools. It is my hope that these resources may support your writing practice.
