Storytelling Resources

Useful Books

Writing Class in a Can

The Fantasy Fiction Formula - This book is a godsend. Debora Chester compressed her entire college level creative writing class into one beginner friendly book. If you only get one thing from this list, get this book. It covers everything you'll need. The rest of these books are supplemental.

Character Creation

45 Master Characters - This book is incredibly useful for beginners. It shows you the basic character archetypes and their common variants. It may seem like bad writing to rely on apparent cliches, but this is the opposite of true. Not all types of people work well together in real life, and that carries over to storytelling. Use of archetypes can help your characters synergize with one another much better. The only poor writing involved with this practice comes from not filling out your character to be more than their archetype.

A Writer's Guide to Characterization - This book will help you create fully realized characters, it works well as the next step in character creation after 45 Master Characters.

Write Characters Your Readers Won't Forget - If writing were cooking, this would be the special sauce of character design.

Storyline Creation

Story Structure Architect - You may have heard the phrase "There are no new ideas in fiction." this may be true, but some ideas have worked just fine for 1000s of years. You can shuffle elements of stories around to make new stories, this is what most people do. There's an art in using old things to create new things. This book will help you learn how to do that in ways that remain interesting and compelling.

20 Master Plots - In video games, there's 3 types of quest: Get a thing, Escort a thing, kill a thing. In spite of this, very few games feel like they are the same. Understanding how to use basic elements to create more complex an unique elements is a skill every writer must master. This book shows you what the fundamental building blocks of stories are, and which ones work well together. It's not a rule book, it's a guideline, but it will help you come up with better plot lines.

Understanding Show Don't Tell - Some prole struggle with the idea of "Show don't tell." That idea is mostly for writing scripts (plays, games, movies, TV) and not novels, but you still need to know HOW to show things vs tell them, especially when working on a novel.

Writing Dialogue

The Dialogue Thesaurus - There's not many very useful books I have found on this subject, but this was of some help.

Worldbuilding

Worldbuilding - This book is focused on hard science fiction, but it's still useful for creating planets if you use the "world first" approch to making a setting.

Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding - This book is focused on creating a world for Table Top Role Playing Games, but since the point of those is to tell a story to a live and participating audience (the hard mode of storytelling, always thank your GM) everything in it works perfectly fine for any other form of storytelling too. This thing is a great resource, and if I could be sponsored by something, I'd like to be sponsored by it because it's one of two books I feel comfortable praising to the heavens. The other is at the start of this list.

Fantasy Cartography

How to Draw Fantasy Art and RPG Maps - This is a good starting point for learning how to draw good maps for your works. Even if you never ever give a map to your readers, you should still make a map, even a crude one, to understand where things are in your world in relation to each other. This is invaluable for keeping things like travel time consistent in your story.

Useful Programs

AstroSynthesis 3.0 - Are you writing a sci-fi story or running a TTRPG that's in space? Do you need a map of an entire flipping stellar empire, or galaxy? This can do that. In 3d. With random generation so you dont have to place everything yourself. It integrates with other programs that can help you make maps for the surfaces of planets too! Speaking of...

Fractal Mapper 8.0 - A poor Mans' Campaign Cartographer. But since CC costs literally $620 dollars for the full version (On sale... for 48% off. Yeah... Can't recommend it due to price), comes with a 350 page book on how to use its BASIC features, and is intended for professional fantasy cartographers to do their work in, that means this is the most robust map making program for beginners out there.

Campfire - If you're bad at organizing your story/plot/worldbuidling notes (you are taking notes, yes?) this is the best program I've ever used for organizing them. Personally, I don't need this. I started using notebooks and pencils, and I'm stuck in my ways. But, this thing was pretty darn great!