#resc.writing

[veneritia]

So...You Want to be a Writeblr? | A Crash Course and Resource Guide

— about.

This post was primarily made for people wanting to make a writeblr and those new to the community in mind, but can be used for anyone. So, who am I? Hi, Maddie here. I've been on writeblr for a few years so I'm pretty sure I know how this whole writeblr thing works, and I wanted to give some advice that worked for me to new writeblrs who might not know where to start!

This crash course will generally cover these topics:

how to get started

intros and formatting them

interacting with the community

graphics, edits, and where to make them

helpful blogs

but if you'd like me to go over something that I missed or glossed over, feel free to send me an ask!

— how to get started.

The first decision you'll have to make is whether your writeblr will be a primary or secondary blog. Primary blogs allows you to reply and follow other writeblrs as your writeblr, but it will require making another tumblr account if you want a clean slate. Secondary blogs will make it easier to keep everything under one account and move/change primary blogs as needed, but you can only interact with others as your primary blog outside of reblogs.

Once you've made your blog, I recommend taking some time to choose a good blog theme for people who visit your blog. You want something visually pleasing and easy to read/navigate.

@serpentarii made a list of theme recommendations for writeblrs here.

@writerthemes is an entire blog centered on finding themes and pages for writeblrs.

— intros and formatting them.

Once you have your blog set up, go and make a writeblr intro! These serve to get your name out into the community and is a quick way show people who you are and what you're working on. You can format your intros however you want, but I recommend including these key points.

Writeblr intros tend to follow this general format:

General Personal Info: Name you'd like to go by, pronouns, age*, a little bit about yourself and your hobbies (optional)

Your WIPs: If you have multiple, give a brief summary of the plot and its genres. If you plan to only have one, feel free to combine your writeblr and wip intro

*Age: a lot of people on writeblr are young and/or cautious of people they interact with. It's absolutely ok to not specify your age, but at least indicate whether you are an adult or a minor and do not lie about your age range.

WIP Intros are a great way to summarize what your wip is about to anyone wanting to learn more. Most WIP intros tend to include the:

Title

Genre

Themes/Tropes

Summary

Excerpt (optional)

Brief summary of main characters (optional)

Draft Status (optional)

Character Intros are optional but they're popular posts to make. You can be as detailed or as vague as you want. Basic character intros include:

Their general Info: name, age, pronouns

Personality

Backstory

Excerpt (optional)

— interacting with the community.

Writeblr is a community for writers to make friends and find support; what you get out of writeblr depends on what you give back to it, and that means taking the first step and interacting with others. There's no foolproof way to get the kind of interactions you might want, but here's a couple of ways that worked for me:

Interact with other people's wips: find writeblrs and wips you like and start commenting on them! Even if it's just in the tags, or a reaction image, or a key smash.

Participate in ask events like Storyteller Saturday (StS), Meet and Greet Monday (MGM or MaGM), and Worldbuilding Wednesday (WbW): Send people asks relating to their wip on these days. It's a good way to start interacting with other people and most writeblrs tend to send an ask back. There are also a lot of open questions posted on writeblr that you can reblog and answer.

Use common writeblr tags to get your posts out: #writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing #writers some writeblr networks also have open tags for anyone to used

Join a writing discord: there are a lot of writing discord groups floating around, and the informality of discord makes it a lot easier to get to know other writers. It's also a good place to get writing advice, wip help, share your work with others, and just have fun. (Shameless promo for wtw - come join us guys <3)

BONUS: here's a post i made on my old account about some general writeblr etiquette.

— graphics, edits, and where to make them.

Writeblr is a place specifically for writing, but I can't deny that people are more likely to pay attention to a work if there's pretty graphics to go along with it. For people who might be new to making graphics or edits, here are a few resources to get you started

Canva.com is a great resource for beginners. It's a free browser-based graphic design platform with a lot of free photos and graphics you can mess around with. You need to make an account to use it and some resources are behind a pay wall, but you can do a lot of things with what is free.

Unsplash, Pixabay, and Pexels are some of the best places to get unlicensed, royalty-free photos to use in your graphics as opposed to pinterest.

Tumblr also has a lot of free PSDs you can use to make edits. You'll need some basic photoshop skills and a photoshopping software. Make sure to credit the maker if you use their PSD.

Photopea is a free, broswer-based Photoshop alternative. It has a tendency of crashing or lagging sometimes, but it gets the job done.

GIMP is another Photoshop alternative that you can download to your computer.

— helpful writing blogs.

This is far from an extensive list of writing-resource blogs out there. These are just a few blogs that have helped me in my own writing and what I hope might help you guys too.

The ScriptX Blog Family is an ever growing and changing network of blogs of content experts ranging from a wide variety of topics ranging from psychology, medicine, equestrians, military, autism, ballet, foodies, etc.

@writingwithcolor a wonderful writing/resource blog centered around racial, ethnic, and religious diversity. For those writing characters outside their own race/ethnicity/religion, here is a good place to ask questions and concerns you might not easily be able to answer.

@rainbowwriting a writing/resource blog centered around helping writers include better LGBTQIA+ diversity. [Note: I'm not certain if they're still active, but their archive is still a good place to read up on and get information.]

@wordsnstuff had a ton of writing-related resources from developing plot, characters, researach, drafting, prompts, and even genre-specific resources.

@inky-duchess is not only a fantastic writer but she's also very knowledgable on European history, how monarchies and the aristocracy work, and different writing theories.

@pens-swords-stuff is both a wonderful writer and a good source of writing-related advice!

@howtofightwrite a blog for writers looking to write realistic fight scenes

@mimzy-writing-online is another great writer and a writing advice blog! They have a useful advice series on writing visually-impaired and blind characters as well as more general writing-related advice.

Welcome to the writeblr community. I hope this post helped you and happy writing!

#writeblr #writers on tumblr #writing advice #writing resources #writing #writer #writeblr community #collection.resources #resc.writing #resc.writeblr