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.

Introducing You To Australia One Story At A Time: Danger Close (2019)

All pictures from IMDb

Hello and welcome! Today, I’m going to be gushing about a movie I watched yesterday called Danger Close: The Battle of Long Tan. For those who don’t know, yesterday (18th August) was the anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan, a battle with an ambiguous outcome that was fought by Australian and New Zealand soldiers during the Vietnam War. Both the Viet Cong and the Anzac forces claimed victory of the battle, but it has gone down in Australian legend to almost the extent that Gallipoli has. Essentially, it was a little over 100 Anzac soldiers against 500-600 Vietnamese, which is incredibly bad odds. No one really won, but only 18 Anzac soldiers died in the skirmish, which is fairly impressive.

Anyway, so yesterday I sat down to watch a movie and ended up picking this one out. As I started to watch it, I realised that I happened to be watching the movie on the 64th Anniversary of the actual battle (no joke, I honestly didn’t realise when I started watching it). I’ve always felt a bit of a connection to this battle, because I spent months of my life as a fifteen year old, researching the Vietnam War, interviewing people who fought in the war and writing an essay on Indigenous soldiers, which later won a prize and is one of my proudest moments. But I still couldn’t remember the date.

And so, while I originally had something else planned for today’s Australian Story, I’ll be talking about Danger Close today.

Backstory

Basically, this movie follows in the wake of very successful movies such as Dunkirk. It’s based on a true story and it follows a similar storytelling device as Dunkirk, taking place over a four or five hour period, and follows several characters in different areas of the battle.

Our main character is Major Harry Smith (Travis Fimmel), an ambitious and arrogant major who is bitter at being assigned to a Company that consists mainly of conscripts. He feels his talents are wasted in this current assignment and a call out to the Long Tan Rubber Plantation is merely an annoyance to him.

We follow a few other characters too, such as Pte Paul Large (Daniel Webber), Cpl Buddy Lea (Lasarus Ratuere), Sgt Bob Buick (Luke Bracey) and Brigadier David Jackson (Richard Roxburgh).

And the plot itself is very simple. The characters are trying to stay alive and rescue 11 Platoon of D Company, who are trapped 400m in front of the rest of the Company. Unfortunately, the Brigadier has ordered them to return to base. So that’s the main conflict of the movie.

What Did I Think of The Story?

I loved it. When I first put it on, I was worried that it was either going to be a dramatised documentary, or an overly patriotic, gory bloodbath bearing little resemblance to the actual historical event.

Fortunately, I didn’t think it fell into either category. It was pretty historically accurate (I couldn’t find any major issues with it), but it also engaged in character development, particularly with Harry Smith and it did have a plot. I also felt that it didn’t engage in gory action scenes and it wasn’t like “white men good, Asian commies bad!” Obviously though, there wasn’t much character development given to the Viet Cong soldiers. However, I felt this approach was justified since the movie was a very personal look at the battle from the eyes of the very young and impressionable conscripted soldiers who fought in it.

The acting was also very well done. There aren’t any big name actors in this movie, but every one of them portrayed his character effectively and believably. The cinematography was also simple and effective and it made the movie a joy to watch.

Australian Culture

As I mentioned before, Long Tan is deeply embedded in Australian culture. Whether rightly or wrongly, we hold it up as an example of Australian courage and resilience. So this story does hold an important place in our heritage.

One of the touches I really liked in this was the inclusion of several Polynesian actors, and particularly the inclusion of Lasarus Ratuere as Buddy Lea. Corporal Lea was a soldier of Aboriginal and South Sea Islander heritage and he was well-known for his bravery during the war. He’s been largely forgotten since then and it was really nice to see him get a little bit of the recognition he deserves. There were also a number of other Polynesian soldiers and just the small act of having them included made me really happy.

Also, there was a scene at the beginning where the Nui Dat base is under fire and one of the soldiers makes the Major a cup of tea. Upon being offered the cup of tea, the major yells, “We’re under attack and your first instinct is to make me a cup of tea! Get the hell out of here!” and when the soldier tries to walk away with the cup of tea– “No, leave that!” It just struck me as the most Australian thing to do in a crisis.

And there was plenty of swearing. Nothing more Aussie than that.

What about you guys? Have you seen any movies about the Vietnam War? Have you seen this movie? What are your opinions on war movies in general? Is a cup of tea the best way to deal with a crisis?

The Pacific:Introducing You To Australia One Story at a Time

All pictures from IMDb

I’ve been waiting to do a post on this topic for quite a while, so I’m excited to finally be sitting down to draft this post!

The Pacific (or, as it is formally titled,  The Pacific in the Wake of Captain Cook), is a TV miniseries, presented by New Zealand actor Sam Neil, that also has a companion non-fiction book, written by Meaghan Wilson Anastasios.

While this miniseries isn’t exclusively about Australia–it’s about the Pacific as a collective–Australia quite often takes centre-stage during it. After all, Captain Cook is widely regarded (though incorrectly) as the discoverer and founder of the Australian colonies. He is to Australians what Columbus is to Americans–a controversial figure, sometimes hated and sometimes revered.

10 YouTube Resources for Writers

I’ve got a bit of a different post for you all today. Since most of us are spending more time on the internet and (hopefully) more time writing or researching our current WIPs, I thought I might share with you my top ten YouTube channels for writing and researching.

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 these ones are suitable for a younger audience, I can’t guarantee anything. Watch them with discretion).

Kati Morton

[EDIT: Since I published this a lot of serious allegations of unethical conduct have come out against Kati Morton, and I also became aware of some other issues that have been circulating the internet for about two years. It is not my place to judge whether some of these allegations are true or not, however, some of the things she has said on YouTube make me very uncomfortable and I no longer watch or recommend her videos. As such, I am deleting my recommendation here, but leaving this for transparency and accountability reasons)