Home School for Writers

I don’t mean this to be a commercial for Audible and I’m certainly not getting monetary gain from the company, but…

I recently reviewed the fantastic writing and literary resources I’ve tapped into the last couple of years and want to share them with you, my fellow writers.

Audible is an Amazon company. You can download the app and listen from your phone or from your computer at home. While thousands of books are available, my favorite aspect are the discounted Great Courses they offer. The Great Courses is a separate company that employs the finest professors in the country to record lectures on their expertise. Buying these courses through audible saves you at least half the price. For example, I commonly pay $12.00 for 30 hours of incredible instruction.

These are my favorite writing courses:

·       Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft

·       Writing Creative Nonfiction

·       Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques (this one is especially good, even for we nonfiction writers)

·       English Grammar Boot Camp

·       Becoming a Great Essayist

·       The Secret Life of Words

·       Building a Better Vocabulary

·       Analysis and Critique: How to Engage and Write About Anything

As a writer, I also want a broad classic literature foundation. The Great Courses has also helped me with this goal. These lectures have educated me and made difficult material digestible:

·       The Complete Essays of Montaigne

·       How to Read and Understand Shakespeare

·       Classics of British Literature

·       Understanding Literature and Life

·       Classics of American Literature

·       The Canterbury Tales

·       Joyce’s Ulysses

·       The Art of Reading

·       The Aeneid of Virgil

A last little tip are these free apps available for thousands of books you may want to read:

·       Overdrive

·       LibriVox

Overdrive allows you free online access to audible books from your local library.

 LibriVox offers audible versions of all the classics.

Immersing myself in this material has:

·       maintained my writing enthusiasm 

·       continued my writing education

·       encouraged a standard of excellence

We don’t have to wait for the one or two writing conferences each year to improve our craft. So many great resources are available every day of the year right in our own homes.

I hope you found something new to enhance your writing. May 2017 be a prosperous writing year for all of us!