We’re just slipping into Autumn in West Wales, a season I love as a self-improvement addict, because it’s time to get learning something again. And it’s also the perfect time to review what’s in our writer’s metaphorical toolkit, what resources do we use to be the writing maestros we may aspire to?

This post is structured using the overall format of the Complete Creative Writing Course: good writing, versatile writing and profitable writing.

Good Writing

Favourite style, grammar and punctuation guides include Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid. I like the latter because it has excellent resources on line, and last year they ran a terrific, free crime writing online conference. If you want to use a free alternative, you may have to combine a couple of apps and here’s a helpful list of suggestions from Pro Writing Aid.

The Economist Style Guide is often recommended, but if you want an oldie but goodie with iconic status, this is your pal. You can download here.

My favourite writing teacher is Roy Peter Clark, whatever your genre, and here’s his Amazon page.

A most effective and sociable way of getting better writing is to join a writers online community and here’s 19 of them – or of course, you can start your own with friends. 

Versatile Writing

One of the most effective ways to get better at writing is to read your work aloud, so you get used to hearing it and record it back. In doing this, you may get ideas for podcasting, or writing that would work especially well as an audiobook maybe or radio broadcast.

Apple, google chrome and microsoft all have free speech-to-text capability, and can be fun to experiment with. Dragon’s Nuance has been the best-known software in the past, and is not cheap, but AI means there are new alternatives being created daily. Here’s an article about this.

Podcast set-up can be fairly inexpensive – here I use a H6 zoom recorder, and three £70/$70 ish microphones (samsung) and Hindenburg software ( aimed at journalists). I had change from £500/$500 when buying this about three years ago.

It pays to stretch yourself maybe outside of your comfort zone, to get more versatile in your writing, more creative and to stand out. As well as podcasting, illustration, cartooning, comic creation, video making, animation call all make your work distinctively different.

Pexels, Unsplash and Pixaby are all resources for free images, to make your writing look especially good.

Profitable Writing

If there’s one type of writing to suggest every writer can benefit from learning about, it’s copywriting. Even if it’s to market your self-published poetry pamphlet or let people know about your literary novel, your own copywriting skills will be invaluable.

And if you want to do business or technical writing, then specializing in sector niches is one the ways to build a lucrative career. Big tech companies for instance, often employ copywriters to make their user guidelines as accessible as possible. Joanna Wiebe is one of the world’s best known copywriters, and here are videos and book links from her.

Headline writing is another essential part of your toolkit, here’s headline.io as your little helper…

Finally, while we’re on profitable writing, were I starting out today I’d find out all I could about self-publishing, and crowdfunding. Mark Dawson, The Creative Penn and David Gaughran are all useful on the first and here’s a crowdfunding guide.

Here’s an example of the second, from a close family member here, and do hope you feel productively tooled-up now for the months ahead.