Iain Broome - 66 best writing tools and tips 2021

Hello there

Just in the nick of time, here is your final edition of the Draft Mode newsletter of 2021 sent by me, Iain Broome, author type, content bod and festive fatigue sufferer.

I hope you’ve had a good break of some kind. Our holiday period has been mostly lovely and completely full on for about two weeks solid. There’s been barely enough time to do anything but eat, sleep and tend to the needs of many, many children.

Anyway, I’ve just about mustered the strength to go back through every Draft Mode from the last 12 months and pull out the bestest articles, videos, tools and tips. You can see them all below – just the titles, no comments from me. There should be plenty that tickles your fancy.

I’ll be back soon with your regular programming, but for now I wish you a happy new year and all the time in the world to write your thing and make good progress.

Iain

Links of the year

Every issue I collect and share the best advice, apps and other shenanigans that I find on my internet travels. Find something useful? Subscribe for free.

How tos

1. How to write an award-winning bestselling first novel
2. How to run a successful membership/subscription programme
3. How To Build An Author Platform
4. How To Get More True Fans
5. How to get your first 1,000 email subscribers
6. How to grow your audience without selling your soul
7. How to Write a Book in Ten Days
8. How to write a good first page
9. How to overcome writer's block
10. How to Write a Novel in the Present Tense
11. How To Use Trello To Write A Book (Or To Survive As An Author)
12. How to build a short story collection
13. How to stay motivated when writing your novel
14. How to move past a creative block
15. How I Wrote My Novel Using Index Cards
16. How to make it as an artist: Stop following the rules
17. How to never face a blank page
18. How to tell a story according to Marvel
19. How to get into ghostwriting
20. How to Harness Community to Build Book Sales and Platform
21. How to write consistently
22. How to start a successful membership business without a huge audience
23. How to Write a Synopsis
24. How to design your ebook like a pro with these 5 simple steps
25. How To Build Your Audience When Your Topic Is You
26. How to increase your word count

Lists, lists, lists

1. 13 Strategies For More Than 1,000 Words Per Hour
2. 25 Ways to Sign Someone Up For Your Newsletter
3. 10 books to help you finish your writing
4. 10 strategies to use YouTube and TikTok to build your online presence
5. 8 Things I Wish I Knew When I was Writing my First Novel
6. 12 Fundamentals Of Writing "The Other" (And The Self)
7. 10 websites every writer should know about
8. 6 Tips for Finding Your Book's Audience
9. 9 Ways to ‘Rewild Your Attention’
10. 5 Fun Writing Exercises To Deepen Your Characters

Best of the rest

1. Should Writers Write Every Day?
2. The thing about focus – we are all different
3. Tools and tips for writing on the go
4. Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have
5. A Simple Manifesto For Making Good Sh*t
6. How Hilary Mantel goes about writing a novel
7. The art of working in public
8. Why authors should keep the day job
9. What's it like to write a song?
10. What Do Literary Agents Do?
11. Why not organise your own writing retreat?
12. A thread of funding opportunities for writers
13. Everything You Need to Know About Book Advances
14. What it's like to revise a book for its second edition
15. The Pros and Cons of Outlining
16. Should I Quit My Job to Focus on My Writing?
17. The best books every aspiring writer must read
18. The key elements of a great novel synopsis

Tools of the year

1. WordCounter: track your daily word count across all your apps
2. Write Every Day: develop a daily writing habit
3. Miro: visual whiteboard for mindmapping and outlining
4. Zenkit Hypernotes: a new way of collaborative writing
5. Plottr: plan your books the way you think
6. Craft: a fresh take on documents
7. Obsidian: A second brain, for you, forever
8. Freedom: Block Websites, Apps, and the Internet
9. BetaReader.io: Reader & Feedback Management for Authors & Publishers
10. Whimsical: plan and organise your writing with sticky notes
11. Aeon Timeline: build a narrative, outline or mindmap
12. FocusList: daily planner and focus timer based Pomodoro technique

Tweets of the year

Tweets are but unpleasant days in a year of many challenges. But some of them are quite good. You can follow @iainbroome and @DraftModeHQ on Twitter.

Nathan Filer @nathanfiler Writing a novel? Be sure to make it *about* something. Here's some writing advice the inimitable Fay Weldon once gave me: "Novels are just essays to which you have attached names and characteristics to warring themes. Nothing special, just more work and a degree of chutzpah." 3:29 PM • Feb 1, 2021 39 likes • 4 retweets

Alex T Smith 🇪🇺 @Alex_T_Smith I will never recover from today reading a review of one of my books that says “I just don’t feel the characters would be friends in real life”. The characters in question are: A PENGUIN A KUNG FU EXPERT SPIDER AN 80 YEAR OLD WOMAN A PIGEON. 1:37 PM • Jun 21, 2021 2K likes • 183 retweets

Jonathan Gibbs @Tiny_Camels Trying to assemble a reading list for a Non-Fiction Creative Writing MA course. What would be on yours? 4:14 PM • Jun 30, 2021 622 likes • 48 retweets

Casie Aufenthie @CasieAufenthie My dad always reads the first draft of my chapters, and I mentioned how weird I felt sending him the current one since there's a sex scene. His response? "Loved it! Passionate but not overly porny." The 'overly' killed me. 😂 #amwriting #WritingCommunity #romanceauthor 12:31 AM • Jul 9, 2021 512 likes • 23 retweets

Melissa Turkington @Leftovers_Movie Bought a used Charles Bukowski book and the best part are the notes in the margins from a woman who clearly was having none of this shit. 7:13 PM • Jul 23, 2021 59.6K likes • 11K retweets

Megan Carroll @MeganACarroll FYI: the slush pile is not ‘dreaded’ by any of us, it is our job and our privilege to look through submissions that authors have worked very hard to get ready and send us. Keep going, be patient, do your homework and you’ll get there! 1:48 PM • Aug 5, 2021 1.1K likes • 92 retweets

Lisa Owens @lamowens ‘I never know what I’m really writing about until 2/3 of the way through. Having an outline never made sense to me … how can you know what the outline is until you know what you’re doing, and how can you know what you’re doing until you’ve done it?’ –Alison Bechdel 9:54 AM • Sep 7, 2021 34 likes • 2 retweets

Gareth L Powell @garethlpowell As writers, we should support each other. Although it may look like we're in competition, we're not. Publishers need a steady stream of books my multiple authors. And every smash hit bestseller keeps the industry in business and provides the funds to publish many other books. 2:33 PM • Oct 4, 2021 360 likes • 46 retweets

Beverley Ward @beverleywrites Something just caused me to realise that I had the idea for my current novel 7 years ago. Sometimes ideas take a long time to percolate and we need to grow and change in real life before we can find the right direction. And sometimes life gets in the way. And it's all ok. 9:43 PM • Dec 19, 2021 23 likes • 0 retweets

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