stewartferris.com
A hub for writers, from writer and publisher Stewart Ferris.
Advice and tools for writers of every genre and format — novels, scripts, non-fiction, poetry, and the career that sits around them. Free craft studios, and the handbooks Stewart Ferris has written from inside publishing.
Sixteen free studios
Tools
First lines, poems, characters, contracts, agents, word counts, prizes — the jobs of writing, each in its own room.
Essential handbooks
Books
How to be a Writer, How to Get Published, and the rest of the craft series — with Amazon.co.uk links.
Ballashiels and beyond
Novels
The Sphinx Scrolls, The Dali Diaries, The Chaplin Conspiracy, Oversleeper, and The Reluctant Rescue.
For the writer in the house
Gifts
Distraction-free typewriters, writing dice, a cube of prompts, and a keyboard that looks like a machine from another century.
Start here
Writer’s tools
A craft studio for novel openings
The First Line
How to write a first sentence that keeps a promise. Principles, tests, and a private reading of the line you are about to send into the world.
Open The First Line →
The hours are already in the week
Found Time
Companion to How to Find Time to be a Writer. Locate the hidden pockets in an ordinary week and turn 250 words a day into a draft over a year of unremarkable days.
Open Found Time →
The desk is only one of the rooms
How Writers Earn
A field guide to thirty-four ways a writer is paid: rights, audio, festivals, teaching, self-publishing, commissions, and the work that sits beside the book.
Open How Writers Earn →
Find the next prize worth entering
The Prize Calendar
A deadline-ordered directory of writing competitions worldwide — short stories, poetry, novels, memoir and scripts — filterable by genre, age and region.
Open The Prize Calendar →
A plot atlas for novelists and screenwriters
Threshold
Map a story against Campbell, Vogler, Harmon, Murdock, Hudson and Snyder — the stations of the hero’s journey, laid out so you can see where the draft actually is.
Open Threshold →
Log the day’s work
Quillmark
A blotter for daily word counts: set a target, watch the week and the month fill, and keep a twelve-week record of the manuscript as it grows.
Open Quillmark →
On paper
