Resources for Writers
Some resources I find myself visiting and revisiting – for inspiration, information or maybe just the administration of a writerly life. They range widely - from speeches and interviews, to collections of work, to submission calendars to historical data. Lots of voices here; maybe they’ll prove useful to you as well?
Inspiration
Public Domain Review
The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project dedicated to the exploration of curious and compelling works from the history of art, literature, and ideas – which have now fallen into the public domain and are free to enjoy, share, and build upon without restriction
ARCHI UK
ARCHI UK is the database of more than 200,000 British Archaeological sites and old maps, covering the whole of England, Scotland and Wales. It is regularly updated. An easy resource to spend many hours doing research on historical locations.
Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds
An open educational resource for Black and Asian British writing today, Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds offers new ways of thinking about Britain, and Britain in the world.
The Marginalian
Maria Popova’s one-woman labor of love explores what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, it was eventually brought online and is now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive
Richard Holloway - the Human Need for Stories
Richard Holloway is one of the most beloved public thinkers of our times. In this Edinburgh Book Fest talk about his new book, Stories We Tell Ourselves, the former Bishop of Edinburgh embarks on a personal, philosophical, spiritual and scientific journey in search of answers to some of the biggest human questions of all.
BBC Modern Writers Archive
Great writers: how do they create the characters we love or hate, the evocative settings and the plots that have us reading late into the night? This collection of interviews with 20th Century authors reveals something of their imaginations – and the personalities which lie behind some of the greatest modern novels.
Samuel Pepys’ Diary
In 1660 Samuel Pepys, an increasingly-important 26 year-old civil servant in London, began writing his diary. He stopped a decade later. This site contains the full text of his diary, with entries published daily – a useful look into the lives and language of the past.
National Poetry Library
The National Poetry Library is the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world. Founded by the Arts Council in 1953 and opened by poets T.S. Eliot and Herbert Read, it’s been at the heart of the nation’s poetry community ever since.
Information
Literary journals’ rankings
Deciding where to submit work can be challenging. Adopting a tiered approach, where you submit to prestigious journals first, means you have to have a way of deciding which are the ‘top’ journals. Clifford Garstang and Erika Krouse offer two of the best lists I’ve seen.
Clifford Garstang’s
Perpetual Folly
This is a brilliant ranking of literary journals publishing fiction, poetry and non-fiction – based on the journals’ number of Pushcart Prize anthology entries over a period of years.
Erika Krouse: 500 Literary Magazines for Short Fiction
Erika Krouse’s exhaustive, tiered ranking factors journals’ prizes, circulation, the money they pay writers (if any) and their overall ‘coolness’.
Rejection Wiki
Also of interest to obsessive submitters: this rejection wiki can help you parse whether your recent rejection was ‘standard’, ‘encouraging’ or ‘editor’s encouraging’…