what a wonder you are

This is an ultimate masterlist of many resources that could be helpful for writers. I apologize in advance for any not working links. Check out the ultimate writing resource masterlist here (x) and my “novel” tag here (x).

✑ PLANNING

Outlining & Organizing

For the Architects: The Planning Process

Rough Drafts

How do you plan a novel?

Plot Development: Climax, Resolution, and Your Main Character

Plotting and Planing

I Have An Idea for a Novel! Now What?

Choosing the Best Outline Method

How to Write a Novel: The Snowflake Method

Effectively Outlining Your Plot

Conflict and Character within Story Structure

Outlining Your Plot

Ideas, Plots & Using the Premise Sheets

✑ INSPIRATION

Finding story ideas

Choosing ideas and endings

When a plot isn’t strong enough to make a whole story

Writing a story that’s doomed to suck

How to Finish What You Start: A Five-Step Plan for Writers

Finishing Your Novel

Finish Your Novel

How to Finish Your Novel when You Want to Quit

How To Push Past The Bullshit And Write That Goddamn Novel: A Very Simple No-Fuckery Writing Plan

✑ PLOT

In General

25 Turns, Pivots and Twists to Complicate Your Story

The ABCs (and Ds and Es) of Plot Development

Originality Is Overrated

How to Create a Plot Outline in Eight Easy Steps

Finding Plot: Idea Nets

The Story Goal: Your Key to Creating a Solid Plot Structure

Make your reader root for your main character

Creating Conflict and Sustaining Suspense

Tips for Creating a Compelling Plot

The Thirty-six (plus one) Dramatic Situations

Adding Subplots to a Novel

Weaving Subplots into a Novel

7 Ways to Add Subplots to Your Novel

Crafting a Successful Romance Subplot

How to Improve your Writing: Subplots and Subtext

Understanding the Role of Subplots

How to Use Subtext in your Writing

The Secret Life of Subtext

How to Use Subtext

Beginning

Creating a Process: Getting Your Ideas onto Paper (And into a Story)

Why First Chapters?

Starting with a Bang

In the Beginning

The Beginning of your Novel that isn’t the Beginning of your Novel

A Beginning from the Middle

Starting with a Bang

First Chapters: What To Include @ The Beginning Writer

23 Clichés to Avoid When Beginning Your Story

Start Writing Now

Done Planning. What Now?

Continuing Your Long-Format Story

How to Start a Novel 

100 best first lines from novels

The First Sentence of a Book Report

How To Write A Killer First Sentence To Open Your Book

How to Write the First Sentence of a Book

The Most Important Sentence: How to Write a Killer Opening

Hook Your Reader from the First Sentence: How to Write Great Beginnings

Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing and the Red Hering

Narrative Elements: Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing and Suspense

Foreshadowing Key Details

Writing Fiction: Foreshadowing

The Literary Device of Foreshadowing

All About Foreshadowing in Fiction

Foreshadowing

Flashbacks and Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing — How and Why to Use It In Your Writing

Setting

Four Ways to Bring Settings to Life

Write a Setting for a Book

Writing Dynamic Settings

How To Make Your Setting a Character

Guide for Setting

5 Tips for Writing Better Settings

Building a Novel’s Setting

Ending

A Novel Ending

How to End Your Novel

How to End Your Novel 2

How to End a Novel With a Punch

How to End a Novel

How to Finish a Novel

How to Write The Ending of Your Novel

Keys to Great Endings

3 Things That End A Story Well

Ending a Novel: Five Things to Avoid

Endings that Ruin Your Novel

Closing Time: The Ending

✑ CHARACTER

Names

Behind the Name

Surname Meanings and Origins

Surname Meanings and Origins - A Free Dictionary of Surnames

Common US Surnames & Their Meanings

Last Name Meanings & Origins

Name Generators

Name Playground

Different Types of Characters

Ways To Describe a Personality

Character Traits Meme

Types of Characters

Types of Characters in Fiction

Seven Common Character Types

Six Types of Courageous Characters

Creating Fictional Characters (Masterlist)

Building Fictional Characters

Fiction Writer’s Character Chart

Character Building Workshop

Tips for Characterization

Fiction Writer’s Character Chart

Advantages, Disadvantages and Skills 

Males

Strong Male Characters

The History and Nature of Man Friendships

Friendship for Guys (No Tears!)

‘I Love You, Man’ and the rules of male friendship

Male Friendship

Understanding Male Friendship

Straight male friendship, now with more cuddling

Character Development

P.O.V. And Background

Writing a Character: Questionnaire

10 Days of Character Building

Getting to Know Your Characters

Character Development Exercises

✑ STYLE

Chapters

How Many Chapters is the Right Amount of Chapters?

The Arbitrary Nature of the Chapter

How Long is a Chapter?

How Long Should Novel Chapters Be?

Chapter & Novel Lengths 

Section vs. Scene Breaks

Dialogue 

The Passion of Dialogue

25 Things You Should Know About Dialogue

Dialogue Writing Tips

Punctuation Dialogue

How to Write Believable Dialogue

Writing Dialogue: The Music of Speech

Writing Scenes with Many Characters

It’s Not What They Say …

Top 10 Tips for Writing Dialogue

Speaking of Dialogue

Dialogue Tips

Interrupted Dialogue

Two Tips for Interrupted Dialogue

Show, Don’t Tell (Description)

“Tell” Makes a Great Placeholder

The Literary Merit of the Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Bad Creative Writing Advice

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do

DailyWritingTips: Show, Don’t Tell

GrammarGirl: Show, Don’t Tell

Writing Style: What Is It?

Detail Enhances Your Fiction

Using Sensory Details

Description in Fiction

Using Concrete Detail

Depth Through Perception

Showing Emotions & Feelings

Character Description

Describing Your Characters (by inkfish7 on DeviantArt)

Help with Character Development

Creating Characters that Jump Off the Page

Omitting Character Description

Introducing Your Character(s): DON’T

Character Crafting

Writer’s Relief Blog: “Character Development In Stories And Novels”

Article: How Do You Think Up Your Characters?

5 Character Points You May Be Ignoring

List of colors, hair types and hairstyles

List of words to use in a character’s description 

200 words to describe hair

How to describe hair

Words used to describe the state of people’s hair

How to describe your haircut

Hair color sharts

Four Ways to Reveal Backstory

Words Used to Describe Clothes

Flashbacks

Using Flashbacks in Writing

Flashbacks by All Write

Using Flashback in Fiction

Fatal Backstory

Flashbacks as opening gambit

Don’t Begin at the Beginning

Flashbacks in Books

TVTropes: Flashback

Objects in the Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear: Flashback Techniques in Fiction

3 Tips for Writing Successful Flashbacks

The 5 Rules of Writing Effective Flashbacks

How to Handle Flashbacks In Writing

Flashbacks and Foreshadowing

Reddit Forum: Is a flashback in the first chapter a good idea?

Forum Discussing Flackbacks

P.O.V

You, Me, and XE - Points of View

What’s Your Point of View?

Establishing the Right Point of View: How to Avoid “Stepping Out of Character”

How to Start Writing in the Third Person

The Opposite Gender P.O.V.

LANGUAGE

 How To Say Said

200 Words Instead of Said

Words to Use Instead of Said

A List of Words to Use Instead of Said

Alternatives to “Walk”

60 Synonyms for “Walk”

✑ USEFUL WEBSITES/LINKS

Grammar Monster

Google Scholar

GodChecker

Tip Of My Tounge

Speech Tags

Pixar Story Rules

Written? Kitten!

TED Talks

DarkCopy

Family Echo

Some Words About Word Count

How Long Should My Novel Be?

The Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test

Writer’s “Cheat Sheets”

what if the stories came from her smooth hands. when she was six she could make pottery that looked like flowers blooming in your palms. could carefully create replicas of any plant she saw.

and medusa was smart. ran from home, tucked up her hair so it looked short, made herself into a little boy. besides, they liked pretty boys. medusa at school with top grades, sending her unknowable stares at the other men. because the whole time she’s learning the planes of their faces, the way they look while they’re thinking, the slight twist of their hand that meant they were lying. 

medusa going home to sketch every little figure. comes to school in the morning with her hands caked in pottery clay. medusa learns. scrubs dirt on her face to mimic their planes. tilts her head the right way when she’s thinking. doesn’t twist her hand when she’s lying.

in her back yard, a little garden grows. statues of ceramic boys only three feet tall. at first, she can’t quite get the faces right. men are not the same as plants. there is something weird about the proportions she uses. medusa frowns.

she starts making animals instead for a bit, annoyed and disheartened. she’d always just been naturally good at it, and the fact she couldn’t just make something felt as if she’d lost her gift.

she makes cats and dogs and her neighbor’s birds and keeps going.

the snake wasn’t her favorite. he just wouldn’t leave her alone, so she gave up and let him sleep on her in the cold nights. besides, he was a small garden snake, couldn’t even bite her hard, just wanted a place of warmth. she let him rest on the angles of her shoulders, right near her neck, even if he sometimes forgot and held her too hard. that was okay. when she was little, she forgot too, sometimes, and shattered the slim walls of her pottery. the snake had a lot of growing up to do.

she loved no one. not because she was cold-hearted. just because it wasn’t something she wanted. she was busy with her artwork.

she chose an apprenticeship under a master craftsman. his sculptures made her breath stop. she was careful in the workshop, kept her things simple, kept her mouth shut. he called her stupid often. she would duck her head. sometimes she would make mistakes on purpose. all the while he only made sculptures of men. said there was no beauty in women. often made savage remarks about those they saw in the market.

and all the while, she watched him. she watched him and she went home and sketched. this is how his hands were when he made a vine. this is how they were when shaping a nose.

and her back yard garden would grow. little boys became her master, over and over and over, until she could get his jaw right. ceramic became sculpture.

he was who took her to athena’s temple. who shouted at her about how beautiful the statues were against her own. every week he’d come back and shame her. asked how the women there were smarter than the man she was supposed to be. medusa ducked her head and grit her teeth.

in her back yard, she made them. she made every god and goddess she’d seen in the city. her favorite was athena. she ached over her features. had spent so long in the world of men, was blinded by the beauty of women.

it was a black night. and medusa thought her master had left the temple before her. she loosened all the bindings that kept her from breathing. took her hair out. worshiped in peace. placed on athena’s alter a small and beautiful thing. the goddess, head tilted, thinking.

when he found medusa, what made him angry was not her small frame. it was the statute. a delicate thing. much better than the ones he had ever made.

he took it and snapped it in half. threw it deep in the temple’s well to rot. pulled her by her hair. demanded to know where it had come from.

medusa, angry, tired of hiding, tired of late nights and being a boy and pretending: medusa, athena-mad, spat on him. “I did it,” her voice is strong and full of hatred, “A woman made something better than a man could.”

He meant to kill her. To bash her head into the temple steps, claim it was an accident - or better yet, the spite of a god made flesh.

when he grabs her hair, the goddess bites back. athena, patron of creators, patron of the arts, patron of girls and those who are smart - she turns medusa’s hair into snakes. 

it is a quick little thing, darts out and draws blood, almost falls from her hair as a result. she catches the creature and runs, runs until she feels numb.

and what if - while her master is explaining her back yard full of frozen men as being evidence of her evilness - what if medusa finds friends in blind women. and they teach her how to feel what she is seeing. how to use her hands with her eyes closed to make maps of whatever she holds. she starts with plants again. her snake is big now, and has babies. she moves on to their little wiggling forms, amused when they make tiny rings around her fingers. she does not live in a cave. she dresses as a man again, goes to market, sells her roses and vines and beautiful (simple) things. buys herself and the women a nice house out beyond all the noise of it. fills their garden with frozen men.

when the men come to kill her - because now her name is known, it is whispered, sticks in the throat - they don’t find her. they find a tall man who tells them: look in the mountains. when they don’t come back, it’s no fault of medusa’s. frankly, she thinks they should have brought more supplies than their swords into the deep woods. she’s not cruel. when they leave, she makes a statue of them, as her version of a memorial.

but one man is not like the others. he finds her with her hair down, humming, dancing around a marble stone. her snakes are warming in the sun.

medusa? he asks her. it’s a name she hasn’t heard in a long while.

she is tired of being hunted. she just wants to make art. she waits for the sword point. but he hesitates. looks at her full in her face.

strikes a bargain. if she makes him a head for his shield, he will tell the others that she is good and dead. and he will sell her art to better patrons when he could - although he suggests at least hiding the signature she has with maybe a little less snake-like scrawl - he would make her name known.

but medusa knows men. knows they will chomp down on a horror story faster than that of the artist. she is already permanent. she says: no, here’s what happens.

after many months, he has his shield. she wouldn’t let him leave with the first nine hundred versions, always found something wrong with them. he grows fond of her in this time, agrees to her terms. even he can’t really look at the shield head-on. she has captured a scream, a rage, too much. it is so utterly human and at once not that it makes his skin crawl.

where medusa’s blood drops, serpents sprawl. or at least, that’s the code she uses. when he finds little girls who can make art, he sends them to her. 

medusa does not expect to be known for the school that she starts. she is a women artist in a time of men, and her name is already dead to them. but i know medusa. i know her. she is known for her work.

winking

clenching

pulsing

fluttering

contracting

twitching

sucking

quivering

pulsating

throbbing

beating

thumping

thudding

pounding

humming

palpitate

vibrate

grinding

crushing

hammering

lashing

knocking

driving

thrusting

pushing

force

injecting

filling

dilate

stretching

lingering

expanding

bouncing

reaming

elongate

enlarge

unfolding

yielding

sternly

firmly

tightly 

harshly

thoroughly

consistently

precision

accuracy

carefully

demanding

strictly

restriction

meticulously

scrupulously

rigorously

rim

edge

lip

circle

band

encircling

enclosing

surrounding

piercing

curl

lock

twist

coil

spiral

whorl

dip

wet

soak

madly

wildly

noisily

rowdily

rambunctiously

decadent

degenerate

immoral

indulgent

accept

take

invite

nook

indentation

niche

depression

indent

depress

delay

tossing

writhing

flailing

squirming

rolling

wriggling

wiggling

thrashing

struggling

grappling

striving

Arouse -  agitate, awaken, electrify, enliven, excite, entice, foment, goad, incite, inflame, instigate, kindle, provoke, rally, rouse, spark, stimulate, stir, thrill, waken, warm, whet, attract, charm, coax, fire up, fuel, heat up, lure, produce, stir up, tantalize, tease, tempt, thrum, torment, wind up, work up