10 More YouTube Resources for Writers

Back in May, I did a pretty successful post on YouTube Resources for writers, and today I thought I would come back with a sequel to that post and present to you 10 more YouTube resources that you may or may not find helpful.

These resources are quite varied, so obviously not every one is going to find them helpful, but hopefully you find at least one or two that help you in your writing journey.

(Disclaimer: Not all YouTube channels are made alike and while I have made every effort to ensure that those that are not suitable for a younger audience have been flagged, I can’t guarantee anything. Also, some people may be disturbed or upset by things that I am not. Watch them with discretion).

Storied

Storied is a YouTube channel run by several different women and it focusses on…well, stories. It has two subchannels, within the channel, one being “It’s Lit” and the other being “Monstrum”. It’s Lit is hosted by Lindsay Ellis and Princess Weekes and they discuss books, movies and deconstruct tropes, with a lot of fun banter thrown in. Monstrum is hosted by Dr Emily Zarka, who examines popular monsters, urban legends and cryptids, with a focus on discovering their history and the cultures they sprang from, which is a great resource for fantasy or horror writers.

This is still a fairly new channel, but their videos are entertaining and high quality, and there’s plenty of fodder for fantasy tales in there!

Daniel Greene

Daniel Greene is possibly the biggest fantasy YouTuber currently operating. He’s interviewed famous and successful authors such as Christopher Paolini, Brandon Sanderson, Evan Winters and Joe Abercrombie. He often examines tropes, unpopular opinions, posts book reviews, as well as weekly news from the fantasy publishing and moviemaking world. While Daniel has some great general writing advice, his channel is particularly interesting and valuable to fantasy and sci-fi writers.

Lindsay Ellis

Lindsay Ellis has a varied channel, however, most of her videos focus on pop culture and analysis of movies, books and tropes. While I do put out a content caution for Lindsay’s channel (probably not suitable for younger writers, there’s frequent swearing, some sexual content and definitely a few videos that are not appropriate), there’s plenty of interesting stuff for writers to explore. You’ll come away having learnt a lot about what makes successful fiction, problematic tropes and stuff like that.

(Also, if you remember, she’s the cohost of It’s Lit)

Jill Bearup

Jill’s channel is widely diverse and fascinating, but her specialty is fight scenes in movies, books and stage. She studies fight choreography and her critiques of famous movie fight scenes–both positive and negative–are really interesting to watch, especially as someone who struggles with writing good fight scenes. She also has videos about fandoms, interesting books and movies, and basically anything else that seems to catch her fancy.

Sideways

Sideways is a channel dedicated to music, particularly musical scores in movies. While this doesn’t exactly seem directly related to writing, I have actually found these videos fascinating from a storytelling perspective. The videos often focus on the function of music in storytelling, and I’ve often found these aspects of storytelling enlightening view from a different point of view. For example, Sideways’ videos on the Star Wars soundtracks forced me to think about certain aspects of telling a tale that I’d never considered before. Basically, I think there’s a lot to be learned from other artists and plus, these video essays are entertaining anyway.

Alexa Donne

Alexa Donne’s channel focuses pretty much exclusively on the technical aspects of writing and publishing. As a published author, she makes videos on topics such as how to write a query, amateur writing mistakes, plots and plotting, editing advice and surprising twists. Of course, her advice is subjective and won’t work for everyone, but she’s got a lot of content to go through and I’ve enjoyed a lot of her videos.

Bernadette Banner

Bernadette Banner isn’t actually a writer, she is a crafty woman who makes vintage clothes and critiques historical costuming in movies and stage show. She has content which talks about the history of different clothing items, critiques movies, and making historical costumes. If you’re into learning more about historical fashion, or you write historical fiction, you should definitely check out her channel.

Center Row

Center Row is run by a fellow named Ben, who analyses movies and is particularly fond of defending animation. He talks about remakes (yes, Disney ones), the awesome qualities of animation, story tropes, how to utilise different writing techniques and has a whole series on how he would fix movies that failed in the compelling character or plot department.

Again, I do have a content caution for his channel as he does talk about things such as why R ratings are a thing and whether there should be sex scenes/nudity in movies, so it would not be appropriate for younger viewers. However, he deals with these topics respectfully and thoughtfully, so I don’t see them as being a problem for older viewers.

Ted and Ted X

If you ever need to know something, Ted or Ted X probably has a talk on it. I know for me, I have relied on them for an incredibly diverse range of topics. Two years, during NaNoWriMo, when I wrote Wattle Fires, I watched literally dozens of talks on stammering, deafness, psychological issues and a bunch of other things.

Bottom line? If you’ve got a question, Ted and his little brother X, have got an answer.

Brendan Sanderson

You’ve most likely heard of Brendan Sanderson, but he hasn’t had a YouTube channel for very long. He’s got a lot of good content, mostly on writing techniques, but also on his own novels, and just random writerly chats. Sanderson is a great author and his advice is very good and he’s an entertaining guy.