Companion studios
Companion studios
Each job of writing has its own room. These studios do the specialised work — names, people, plot maps, first lines, word counts, agents, contracts. All of them by Stewart Ferris. The full set lives at stewartferris.com.
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 →
Character names
Nomina
Names with meaning. Choose a grain — origin, temper, element, role — and receive given names and surnames whose etymologies fit the character you are writing.
Open Nomina →
Characters
Dossier
A literary character workshop. Build round characters with nine sections of lists — class, accent, desire, trauma, politics, and the lie they live by.
Open Dossier →
Plot
Threshold
A plot atlas for novelists and screenwriters. Map a story against Campbell, Vogler, Harmon, Murdock, Hudson and Snyder — the stations of the hero’s journey.
Open Threshold →
Starting
Write Anyway
When inspiration is absent. Exercises, prompts, and a quiet desk for getting words down without waiting to feel like a writer.
This studio
Hours
Found Time
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 →
Word counts
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 →
Language
Word Census
Count every word in a manuscript on your own machine. Flags repeated long words, sets names aside, and suggests alternatives. Nothing is uploaded.
Open Word Census →
Company
The Writing Circle
A catalogue of writing groups — local rooms and online circles — filtered by place, genre and whether you want a chair in the room or a screen.
Open The Writing Circle →
Money
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 →
Contracts
Inside the Contract
Royalties, advances, subsidiary rights and the clauses that decide what a UK or US book deal actually means. A field guide, not a scare story.
Open Inside the Contract →
Agents
The Writer’s Guide to Agents
What an agent does, whether you need one, how to approach them, and a directory of literary and film agencies you can sort by region and type.
Open The Writer’s Guide to Agents →
Submissions
The Query Book
A private ledger of what you sent, to whom, and when to follow up — agents, publishers and producers, so nothing sits forgotten in an outbox.
Open The Query Book →
Prizes
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 →
Publicity
The Author’s Desk
Book publicity without the agency: a clear promise, a press letter, a few rooms that will have you, and a way to be found.
Open The Author’s Desk →