I loved this question that came in from Cate. She said she wants to learn more about writing while she’s on her summer break, but she has zero budget. What can she do? How can she put together some form of a writing curriculum without spending money?

Habitual, intentional growth is a core value of mine, so I was a little giddy at the thought of getting to create today’s post. (#nerd) The reality is that the majority of published writers DIYed their writing education, including the three of us who publish frequently on Go Teen Writers. Jill has the most degrees among us, including but not limited to a bachelor’s in home-ec business and a masters in education. Shannon spent a year in theological studies. I skipped the college experience completely and worked full time instead.

While there are authors who majored in creative writing and have their MFA, and while I’m sure they learned really valuable things at school, having a formal writing education doesn’t necessarily help you get published. Or stay published. Or run a small business. Or market your books. The formal education on writing might be very valuable and worthwhile, but there are still many things about being an author that the college-educated writer has to figure out outside of school. (If you’re interested in reading more on this topic, here’s a post that you might find helpful: What Should I Study In College If I Want To Be A Writer?)

I say all this to make it clear that Cate’s question shows how smart she is. Figuring out how to learn what you need to learn, how to develop new skills or deepen ones you already have, is a critical skill to being a successful author.

So, how do you go about DIYing your writing education? Here are my thoughts, rooted in a lifetime of being self-taught on writing and publishing.

Start by identifying what you want to learn.

You might have a very long list here, and that’s okay! You might even find it helpful to break your list into categories. You could make a list of things you want to learn about for writing stories (e.g. story structure, how to write sequels, theme and symbolism, etc.) And you could also make a list of more businessy type things. How do you effectively network? How do you get an agent? Should you blog? What kind of social media presence should you have? How do you build a website?

You might also find that you don’t really know what belongs on that list. Sometimes we’re so new to something, we don’t even know what questions we should be asking. There was once a small, plastic triangle piece that broke on the inside of our dryer. We needed to replace it, but we didn’t know what it was, so how would we know what store to go to? (We ended up Googling “plastic triangle washer that holds belt in dryer.” Turns out, it’s called a “tri-ring.” Now you know.)

It’s okay to not know. If you feel embarrassed about it, remind yourself that when I started writing, I thought I’d invented the genre young adult fiction. For real, I queried agents thinking nobody else was writing YA. While YA wasn’t the powerhouse in the industry it is now, it definitely existed. I just didn’t know better, yet still I have achieved my dream of being a published author.

You might find it helpful to build your list by reading “overview” type posts. Posts like Traditional Publishing: An Overview can help you identify items for your list. Or my post on my writing process, An Overview From Beginning to End. Or perusing a list of our most popular posts on Go Teen Writers.

You might also find a book like Go Teen Writers: Write Your Novel (or Edit Your Novel depending on where you feel you need the most help!) to be helpful since those take a broad view on the process, and we purposefully wrote them to show you how we do things differently from each other. (Since we’re talking specifically about DIYing on a budget of zero dollars, check your library. My library is amazing at ordering in books if I ask for them, or you can do an interlibrary loan. )

“Hire” your faculty.

Because YOU are in charge of your writing education, YOU get to hire the staff. That’s kinda cool, right?

This will take some trial and error. Sometimes I have writing teachers who I love, love, love . . . for a month. After that, I might realize any number of things that make them a bad fit for my faculty. I might discover they have a couple of brilliant insights into the craft . . . but that’s it. That every chapter/blog post/podcast episode relates back to those. They’re a great guest lecturer, but they don’t need a full-time position.

Or I might notice after practicing their methods, their style doesn’t jive with me. This doesn’t mean it’s WRONG advice, just that it’s not working for me currently. Like there’s one podcaster who I really enjoyed . . . but then I noticed an unhelpful pattern. If I listened to too many episodes in a row, I began to feel stressed about my career.

Don’t look for one website/teacher/podcast to answer all your writing questions. Each member of your faculty will likely have a specialty. Like if you want to learn more about self-publishing, you could learn from Joanna Penn on TheCreativePenn.com. If you’re trying to build better writing habits, you could learn from James Clear. If you’re trying to improve your storyworlds, you could turn to Jill’s Storyworld First blog post series and book.

While you may have to kiss a few frogs to find your prince of a teacher, once you find someone you like, you don’t have to keep looking for gurus. You don’t need ten people to teach you about theme, right? That gets overwhelming fast.

Be picky about who gets to be on the faculty list of your DIY education!

A couple years ago, I had a friend who was interested in getting a book published, largely to make money. She observed that most authors appeared to also have a “How to write books!” side-hustle. She said, “It makes me think there’s not as much money in the actual writing and publishing of books as I would like there to be.” She wasn’t wrong.

Many, many, many of the aspiring authors I know write blog posts or teach classes about writing before they’re published. This isn’t wrong, and I love that we’re living in a generation where it’s so easy to share with others what we’re learning. Their advice may be fabulous and spot-on!

But early on in my career, as I DIYed my education on marketing and platform building, I grew tired of taking marketing advice from people who had never written and marketed a book. (That is, other than their book on how to market a book, ha ha!) If I’m taking advice from someone on how to market a novel, I prefer it to be from somebody who has marketed lots of novels. If I want to learn more about how to write stories, I want it to be from people who are immersed in stories. Mostly these are other authors who write books I love, but sometimes it’s also agents or editors. Even if they don’t write stories for a living, they have unique knowledge about stories from the vast amount that they’ve read.

Podcasts are my favorite budget item in my DIY writing education. Not only are the classes free, but it’s a great way to be exposed to other teachers who you might want to add to your faculty. Podcasters interviewing other experts is the number one way that I’ve added to my faculty list!

Don’t discount experiential learning.

(i.e. Read a lot. Write a lot.)

Who’s your favorite author? Shannon Hale? Jason Reynolds? Charles Dickens? John Green?

Whoever they are, you can put them on your faculty. Don’t just casually read their books. Read with intention and purpose. Here are two posts to help you know how to do that:

Reading Makes You A Better Writer

How To Read Like An Author

Reading about writing is great. There’s a lot you can learn from that, and Go Teen Writers wouldn’t exist if I didn’t think that was valuable. But reading books like the ones you want to write is critical to your education. Reading not-so-great books is also helpful, if you take the time to identify how and why the book missed the mark.

About ten years ago, I agreed to help judge a big contest for unpublished authors. I was sent the first three chapters and a synopsis for ten different manuscripts. I walked away from that contest feeling new clarity on what works in a synopsis and story opening and what doesn’t because I read them all back-to-back.

If you want to learn more about writing in a specific genre, reading that specific genre is the fastest way to grow.

Want to write a bestseller? Stalk the bestseller lists every week and commit to reading the books.

Want to write cozy mysteries? YA fantasy? Historical romance? Look at the big names who are publishing now, and read multiple books from each of them. Yes, you can absolutely learn important lessons from cozy mystery authors of the past, like Agatha Christie, and it’s important to read them too. But you’re trying to get your book published NOW for TODAY’s audience. Readers in this time and place have much different expectations than the readers of the 1920s.

If you have no budget for books, hit up your school or city or county librarian. Keep lists of books to read, and put ones you enjoy or want to study in-depth on your birthday wish list.

And please, I beg you, if you want to learn to write better, then invest time in actually writing. It’s so, so easy to read about writing, talk about writing, watch classes on writing, share funny memes about writing, and basically do so many writing-related things that you deprioritze actually writing.

If you only take one action step from this post let it be this: Write more. That’s the number one way you’ll grow as a writer, is to write more. Here’s a post on making space and time for writing if that’s something you need help with.

A few more quick tips:

• Expand how you use your library. Look into the resources your library has that will help you grow as a writer. Do they carry periodicals? Check out issues of Writer’s Digest. My library often has authors teach classes, and they’ve started recording them and making them available online. They also have a free multi day writing conference every year. I’ve been on faculty twice, and it’s really well done. Your library also might have groups of writers who meet there. They may have a partnership with Master Classes or carry The Great Courses DVDs. Think beyond books!
• YouTube! Lots of authors make short classes. I’ve watched multiple 10 or 15 minute tutorials on how to do a number of things related to writing. Jill has a great one on formatting a fiction manuscript.
• TED talks: Look up TED talks on writing or stories or time management.
• Get specific on Google: Google is an amazing tool, but you have to feed it the right information. “What are different ways to write a novel?” “How to write a good cozy mystery.” “Methods for tracking story ideas.” “Tips for being productive as a writer.” “How do I develop good habits?” All of these are going to work way better than, “How to write a novel.” Also, the vast majority of writing websites have search bars. So you can also go directly to your “faculty member’s” website and run a search there to see if they’ve covered this topic before.

Stephanie’s faculty:

These are teachers and resources that have been helpful to me. Not a comprehensive list by any means!

Story and writing:

HelpingWritersBecomeAuthors.com by K. M. Weiland. I frequently turn to this site if I’m looking for help with structure in my stories. Like how to create a character arc or different types of story structure. I own several of her books and listen pretty faithfully to the podcast.

Writing Excuses podcast: I’m not a sci fi or fantasy author, but I still learn lots of helpful things from this podcast, which is currently in its sixteenth season.

2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron is a super cheap book that taught me some really helpful things about writing better and faster. This book was born out of a blog post, which is still available: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html

James Scott Bell is someone I’ve turned to repeatedly through the years. Your library will have some of his writing classics, like The Art of War for Writers. His indie published ebooks are super reasonable. I highly recommend Write Your Novel From The Middle.

Writing business:

TheCreativePenn.com is where I head most often if I have questions related to indie publishing.

For social media and marketing, I’ve bounced around on who is teaching me. I’m currently on the hunt for a new faculty member! I used to listen to a podcast called The Smarty Pants Book Marketing podcast, which is a couple years old and they don’t make new episodes. Good stuff in the archives, though. You can access that here: https://womenfinishingwell.com/for-writers/

Newsletter Ninja is a book that taught me a lot about email marketing.

Emotional aspect of being a writer:

I have three books that I reread for this: A Million Little Ways by Emily P. Freeman, which is fantastic for the Christian writer. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and Fierce on the Page by Sage Cohen. I often read sections of these for five-ten minutes before I start a writing session.

Time management and habits:

The Before Breakfast podcast is my jam for time management because the host has 5 kids and works as a writer, so her stuff is really applicable to me. For years I read time management books written by CEOs who had assistants. Not as helpful!

Habit building: Atomic Habits by James Clear and Finish by Jon Acuff are the two books that have taught me most recently, both of which your library would have. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey is a classic for a reason. That book is very dense, so don’t expect to breeze through it!

What would you like to learn more about? Who is on your DIY Writing Education faculty? (I’m currently traveling, but will respond to your comments when I return!)