My Top Writing Resources of 2023
Because everyone loves a year-end wrap-up post!
What is a “writing resource,” anyway? Anything that convinces you to sit down and start typing. Anything that keeps you focused and in a good flow rather than sputtering out at the first hint of self-doubt. Anything that improves your writing quality would probably be good too.
So, should be just say the best writing resource is Universal Basic Income and call it a day? It’s almost the end of the year, after all—who wants to work?
Still, I wanted to share a few tools that have made writing easier for me over the past few years, in case any of them spark interest for you. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think I discovered any of them this year, which makes the “of 2023” in the title of this post a little facetious, but the framing narrative of year-end wrap-up posts is what it is.
I write for all sorts of different media—plays, novels, advertisements, websites, instructions, newsletters—so these recommendations run the gamut from aids for fiction writers to professional learning content to just ways of staying comfy when working in a cold basement in the wintertime.
‘Tis the season, after all! Let’s kick it off with…
The one AI writing tool I actually use
My overall perspective on AI writing tools like ChatGPT and Bard is that, while I won’t discount the possibility of them being helpful to people who are already writers eventually, as it stands today the quality just isn’t there. The few times I’ve tried to get one of them to help me with something difficult at work, they’ve done such a bad job I end up closing the window in disgust and move on.
My one exception to this rule? Quillbot.
You know when you’re in the middle of writing, and you’re trying to think of the exact right word, and you’ve got something close but that’s not it, and you end up googling “[word] synonyms” to try to find that one perfect word or phrase you’re missing?
That’s what Quillbot is for. It calls itself an “AI-powered paraphrasing tool”—essentially a souped-up thesaurus that works on long-form content. Instead of having to search for synonyms for individual words, Quillbot can help you rephrase longer pieces of text to avoid repetition and clunky wording.
Better yet, it understands the context of the words you’re using, so it only gives you the synonyms that work for what you’re trying to say. I once gave it a list of five headlines, most of which started with the word “get,” and it helped me find alternatives for each one whether it was something like “get to know your doctor” or “get the care you need.”
I will take a tool that does something small but does it well over software that promises the world but delivers mediocrity every time.
The video that reshaped how I think about branded writing
I got a true liberal arts education in college, which means I learned how to think and how to express my thoughts in writing, but I didn’t learn anything practical—we would never have something so gauche as a marketing major. So a few years back, when I was getting into UX writing for the first time, I took the UX Content Collective’s Fundamentals of UX Writing course.
While the exclusive content in the course was very helpful, I was also happy to discover how much useful information about UX is freely available online, largely thanks to the big tech companies who built the discipline into what it is today. How Words Can Make Your Product Stand Out, a recording of a Google design talk from back in 2017, helped me look at branded writing in a methodical way and develop processes that I still use today.
The whole video is worth watching, but it’s pretty long. For the key points, jump to 3 Best Practices for UX Writing, which heavily inspired my How to Sound Like a Human piece.
The newsletter that convinced me to keep writing my novel
Unlike many writers, I don’t write just for myself. I’ve never kept a diary or journal or done Morning Pages to get my thoughts in order. When I write, I write for an audience.
That means having a writing community is especially critical for me, since if I don’t have anyone to write for, I simply don’t do it. So thank you to everyone currently reading this post—you inspire me.
My pre-pandemic writing group lasted reasonably far into the new Zoom world, but eventually the artistic director who founded the theater running it left to go get a PhD in England (which I am extremely impressed by, for what it’s worth), and like so many larger theaters in the past decade, the organization didn’t survive the departure of the lovely, charismatic leader who brought us all together in the first place.
Cut to me last June, quarantined alone in my bedroom after my first and so far only COVID infection, and thanks to a fairly mild case, bored out of my mind. Looking for writing communities on the internet yet again (the only place I was at the time allowed to interact with anyone), I came across
’s Substack , home of the #1000wordsofsummer challenge.The premise is simple: For a given two-week period of time in the summer, writers commit to writing 1,000 words every day. The camaraderie I found among the writers doing the challenge gave me the motivation to keep pounding out pages that I’d been missing since my writing group disbanded.
Even though I had to start the challenge a week late (my bout with COVID somehow morphed into a stomach virus that decimated my still-weak immune system, apparently), I loved the Slack group where writers of all stripes posted their progress, and a version of it is still going today.
My favorite resource for writing historical fiction
I used to write primarily speculative fiction (sci-fi and fantasy) in part because I was intimidated by the research required to ground a piece of fiction in a real setting. But when I started writing my first historical fiction play, The Young Ladies of the Class of 1902 of Wesleyan University Present, "As You Like It," I discovered I do enjoy the research!
For a playwright, the most important piece to get right in your world-building is usually the dialogue, since that’s what a play text largely is. But how could I know how young college women in 1902 really spoke?
Enter the Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Whether you’re looking for all the hip lingo from the 1920s or a particular decade’s equivalent term for girlies, they’ve got you covered.
(And if they don’t have what you’re looking for, you can also always try Google instead, which is how I ended up on a deep dive about the origins of the phrase “oh my God” while writing that play.)
My #1 item for creating an ideal cozy writing set-up
I live in a duplex apartment where the main living space is in the basement, and it gets cold in the winter. I also hate working at a desk, so I typically bounce around between couches on my laptop while I’m writing. Couch blankets are crucial.
My favorite one is this faux fur reading blanket from Barnes & Noble. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of my writing has been produced from under that blanket. If I have an aesthetic, it’s Cozycore. I just focus better on my work when I’m surrounded by soft things.
The only problem? My dog Eliza is an unrepentant blanket thief, and we spend a lot of time fighting over possession of that blanket (she’s asleep on it right now, actually).
How I get my dog out of my lap so I can write
Eliza is a rescue from Miami, and I think she still resents us for introducing her to New York winters. Her preferred place to be all winter is on a blanket, on me, or ideally both at the same time, which means it’s hard to get much of anything done. In our household, “I can’t move, there’s a dog on top of me” is a foolproof excuse.
Fortunately, in one of my greatest strokes of inspiration a few Christmases ago, I bought her an electric heating pad that lives on the other couch all winter each year. The one we have isn’t available for purchase anymore, but that brand has lots of other options for both dogs and cats.
I love my extremely cuddly pup, yes. But sometimes I need a bit of bodily autonomy too, and this is how I get it.
My top trick for getting the words out when the pressure gets to be too much
Look, I understand. Picking up the laptop, opening a new document in Microsoft Word (yes I still write in Word for my personal projects—I use Google Docs for work), it can feel quite intimidating.
I’ve often found that when I start a new piece, I’m not comfortable officially starting it, and what I really need to do is write something quick and janky that doesn’t feel real until I get in the groove of things. So I write on the Notes app on my phone while lying in bed.
Yes, that’s the whole recommendation. No fancy products, no one perfect journal that will inspire you to change all your writing habits. Just making do with what you have so you can write what feels good.
Most of the time, you don’t need to buy things to be a better writer (for yourself, at least. Buy many things for your animals, they deserve it). You just need to trust yourself.