Ryan M. Patrick

Going to collect all of the different resources that I find helpful in one post. Hope it helps someone and I’ll be referring back to it a ton later.

It’ll be divided into three sections: writing craft, feedback, and business.

Writing Craft

Sanderson

This is the “how to” of writing.

The best place I recommend people to start with is with Brandon Sanderson’s writing lectures at BYU that have been taped and uploaded to YouTube. He teaches a class every year and there’s other versions floating around but the 2013 and 2020 versions are the two that I watched/listened to.

The 2013 lectures are here:

the 2020 lecture series is here:

and the newest set of videos (which I haven’t had time to watch/listen to) is here:

Note that I am not a huge fan of Sanderson’s books – some of them are good, some are ok, and some I didn’t finish. But I really appreciate his lectures and they really helped me see writing in a new light. They’re very SF/F heavy and are very focused on how he writes, but I found them incredibly helpful.

The other Sanderson thing that I found helpful was his former podcast, Writing Excuses. He’s no longer on it, and I found the seasons without him to be somewhat subpar, but the first 10-15 are amazing and great for commutes. They recommend starting with Season 10 – it’s where they started to put it into a “master class” format – but I found 1-9 to be incredibly enjoyable as well.

Craft Books

You can’t talk about writing craft without the many books out there to help authors!

The book that I found the most helpful was Story by Robert McKee. It was recommended to me by one of my first “writing friends” (Brian Crenshaw) and I cannot point enough people in its direction.

It’s technically a screenwriting book, but it blew me away with how helpful it is for writing novels and short stories as well. The archplot described within is the core of all of my stories. The examples are all movies, so hopefully you have a good grasp of classic cinema (I didn’t!), but the information is second to none. I own both a digital and paperback copies.

There’s sequels as well – Dialog, Character, and Action – but I haven’t read them. I’ve also heard they’re more focused on screenwriting and less of it applies to novels. Your mileage may vary.

The next one I recommend is Save the Cat or Save the Cat Writes a Novel.

The former (which I’ve read!) is a screenwriting book as well, the latter (which I haven’t, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about) is for novels. They’re similar to McKee’s – I found Save the Cat less helpful, but with better examples – however more accessible.

The last book I recommend is the one everyone talks about – Stephen King’s On Writing.

While I found it interesting – especially the autobiographical details – it wasn’t particularly helpful for me. However, writers who are pantsers and hate outlining have had more success following King’s advice. I’m an outliner and didn’t.

There’s tons of other books out there, but as I and some of my writing friends have found, the advice all starts to blend together after a while. I recommend reading some craft books but not spending all of your time on them – it’s better spent writing!

Feedback

This is a common question I get asked – where to get alpha/beta readers and feedback?

They’re out there, but you need to find them!

I’ve had the most success on Discord, of all places, in a couple of small writing communities that I’ve joined and stayed in. They’re all private, but the SFF Insiders server is the one large one I’ve found manuscript trades on that have produced outstanding feedback. Another one is the Writing Hub server – I’ve had success in the past, and a mod is a friend of mine, but not as much recently.

Another place that I’ve found great writing friends and manuscript trade partners is Twitter (X?)! That requires quite a bit of work and social energy, but if you follow the right people (me!) you’ll find people looking for beta readers all of the time. This is probably on par with Discord – the trades are personal, you know the other person, and they tend to go smoothly.

Reddit’s /r/betareaders I recommend with caution. I’ve found some of my closest writing buddies there, but I’ve also ran into cranks, scammers, and just some of the worst people out there. If you’re a beginning writer just trying to get any kind of feedback, it’s probably a good idea to just get your feet wet in. If you’ve finished a couple of novels, I’d be very careful and screen who you deal with – look at their post histories and whatnot – to make sure you’re not going to get a 1-sided trade. One day I’ll collect all of my /r/betareaders posts in a blog post for us all to laugh at!

The last place is Goodreads – there’s plenty of places on the forums where people are looking for feedback and manuscript trades. I’ve never used it but I have friends who have and it sounds similar to Reddit. If you screen your swap partners, you’ll probably be fine.

Business

There’s two podcasts I recommend for people trying to learn about the industry, one for traditional publishing and one for indie publishing.

For traditional publishing, I cannot recommend Publishing Rodeo enough. I stopped listening to it when I really went down the indie/self-pub route but it’s full of great information and the hosts are both open and honest about their successes and failures.

For indie/self-publishing, the gold standard is 6 Figure Authors. They aren’t currently putting out new episodes and some of the older ones have information that’s changed (such as Amazon categories and how they apply to books) but it’s just an absolute wealth of knowledge. There’s other self-publishing podcasts out there – Self Publishing Formula and whatnot – but I love 6FA and I hope they get back to putting out new episodes soon!

A few podcasts that I’ve gotten into recently:

• Writer Dojo with Larry Correia and Steve Diamond
• Novel Marketing Podcast with Thomas Umstattd Jr.
• The Six Figure Author Experiment
• The Creative Penn with Joanna Penn

Conclusion

This isn’t an end-all and be-all – this is what I’ve read and listened to and found helpful. I’m always interested in new craft podcasts/books/etc – if you find any send them my way!