Rabindranath Tagore
You know, I'm not the first one to say this but the Internet is an amazing thing. Since the creation and acceptance of the World Wide Web in 1994 (or thereabouts), this wasteland has provided an abundance of all things weird, insightful, scary, disgusting, beautiful... really, anything you could possibly imagine, you can find on some website, just waiting for you to discover.
Since I've begun my writing journey, I've found several sites that offer help for the newbie writers. They are many and varied and easy to find. Search, peruse, consume and discard to your liking. I'd like to instead focus on a more specific genre: Podcasts. I won't insult your intelligence by trying to describe what a podcast is. The vast majority of you know and have listened to them. If you are one of the few cave-dwellers who have never heard of them, look here.
I'd like to highlight a few here, as they are ones the blossoming writer will find useful as they hone their craft. There are many more than I will name here; these are just ones that I personally have found to be quite insightful, enlightening, and even fun to listen to. In order of preference, I bring you:
Writing Podcasts Worth Listening To
- Writing Excuses
Ok, this one is at the top of my list, and for good reason. This is a weekly podcast that is hosted by four accomplished authors, one of them being among my favorites: Brandon Sanderson. The podcast takes a specific subject and spends about fifteen minutes (Their tagline is "Fifteen minutes long because you're in a hurry, and we're not that smart") discussing it among themselves. They talk about how they might tackle a certain problem, how they go about their writing lives, and how YOU might use what they've learned to great effect. In the current season (Season 10) they've been going through the complete writing process of a book. Insightful and fun to listen to, I highly recommend any aspiring author to pick it up. - I Should Be Writing
I really like this one simply because I can relate to the host. ISBW is a podcast that started back when the host, Mur Lafferty, was trying to break into the writing scene. She has since finished and published a book and several short stories, but she keeps the lights on at ISBW and for good reason. The podcast helps budding writers with a lot of the pitfalls of the writing process. Mur goes about it from the viewpoint of a struggling writer which proves useful in relating to the rest of us. She has interviews with authors, agents and any other milleiu-specific personality and picks their brains to ask the questions we'd all like to know. As well, Mur accepts questions from her audience via e-mail and attempts to answer them on the show. Highly recommended, although her casts are irregular in their frequency. - Odyssey Writing Workshop
I found this one at some point and found it quite interesting. The Odyssey Writing Workshop is a workshop people from around the world apply for when their work is approaching publication quality. You can get the entire spiel from their website, but the gist of the podcast is that they provide excerpts from their classes for us wannabees to listen to. They can be quite interesting and there is an extensive backlog that you can catch up on. I haven't had a new one from it in a while, but I believe it's kind of seasonal so that's to be expected. - The Secrets
This one is a real treat. Michael A. Stackpole headed it up... you may know him from his Star Wars books as well as his other Sci-Fi tomes that are, to me, fantastic. He used this podcast as an advertising platform for his 'Secrets' newsletter, but the podcast itself provided a LOT of very good information. You can still listen to the podcasts he made and find quite a bit of stuff to store into your brain. The podcast is now defunct, but still applicable!
Well, there you go. Those are my top four. There are a plethora of others, and many of them are likely very good as well. Still, I highly recommend my four here. At the very least, it can help get you into writing mode... and that's always a good thing. Do you have a favorite writing podcast you'd like to share? Maybe you have a podcast of your own? Let us know!
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