15+ free tools and resources for writers

At its core, writing is not expensive. Part three of my free stuff series!

Jun 11, 2025

You’re reading Soft Hobbies, a weekly newsletter for creatives in all mediums, with a special focus on writers. I’m Auzin, a Seattle-based writer in the fiction, poetry, and tech spheres. Feel free to visit my author website or check out my socials.

Greetings to the 680 softies who subscribe to this newsletter! Thank you for being here.

A couple months ago, my boyfriend and I found two matching shelves in the alley behind our house. They were cute, in great shape, and they fit perfectly on a wall where we needed more storage. Useful free stuff is the best, right? A reminder to join the Buy Nothing app to give and receive awesome free stuff with your neighbors!

We often forget that writing doesn’t have to be expensive, because the accoutrements and culture surrounding it seem to have no ceiling in terms of price — from the perfect fancy pen to a $50k+ MFA degree. But you don’t need a co-working studio subscription, a Freewrite, or a paid residency in the mountains to write, although all those things are awesome. You mostly just need to stay in the chair and tell your fears and doubts to leave the room for a while.

A recent time I felt like a visibly real-and-cool writer was when I sat in a coffee shop for 2-3 hours and wrote by hand. My chair was uncomfortable, my headphones were blasting rain sounds to drown out the conversations around me, and I hadn’t bought anything. There was a very real possibility of a barista telling me to buy a scone or get out, which lent a frantic nature to my scribbling and a probably-grim expression to my face. It was the most focused I’d been in weeks. I’m very grateful to the kind employees for letting me take up space that day :)

I love how popular my free resource posts one and two have been, so here’s part three! Definitely take a peek at the first two and bookmark them if you haven’t already. Here are some comments from the previous posts:

The list of awesome free stuff:

Back in February, I created and shared this list of 100 free journal prompts. It’s still available for anyone to use! One of my friends even created a Substack account just to leave a comment to let me know she’s been using them :)
Did you know you can read The Elements of Style online for free? I should really get on that, lol…
Harvard University offers over 100 free online courses that anyone can take. Here are some that may be especially interesting to writers:
1. Our Information Emergency: Navigating the Media Environment in 2021 (probably still helpful for media literacy in 2025)
2. Citizen Politics in America: Public Opinion, Elections, Interest Groups, and the Media
3. Introduction to Digital Humanities (essential for primary source research)
4. Digital Humanities in Practice: From Research Questions to Results
5. Religious Literacy: Traditions and Scriptures
6. Structure and Function of Argument: Introduction to Critical Thinking
7. Modern Masterpieces of World Literature
8. Shakespeare's Life and Work (there are a few other Shakespeare classes, too!)
9. Japanese Books: From Manuscript to Print (kind of a vague title, but this is about scrolls from the premodern period)
You can also take free courses on writing, marketing, and blogging from Reedsy, here. I’m pretty interested in this fantasy fiction course.
Need some fonts? The League of Moveable Type is an open-source font foundry with about 16 professional, legible fonts available for free on its homepage. You can find more font websites in my previous free resource posts!
Answer The Public is a keyword research tool that’s well-known to marketing and SEO folks, but I think it has a great application to newsletter writing and blogging as well. Search for your newsletter topic and see what people want to know about it. For example: if you write about baking, you can input “baking” and find out what the top questions being asked on Google are. Then you can write a post geared towards answering those questions! You get 1 free search a day, or up to 3 if you register for free.
Google Scholar helps you find scholarly literature, including: peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, abstracts, technical reports, and court opinions and patents.
The Diversity Style Guide is geared towards journalists, offering “guidance, context and nuance for media professionals struggling to write about people who are different from themselves and communities different from their own.” I think it would be great for anyone writing for the public. It has a large, but not overwhelming list of resources and glossaries.
How much does Rolling Stone pay its writers, anyway? Who Pays Writers has that answer, and a lot more. “An anonymous, crowd-sourced database of pay rates across print and digital media.”
There are a lot of scams, shady institutions, and con artists out there who don’t have writers’ best interests in mind. If something ever feels fishy to you, check out Writer Beware to research or report it.
You are now entering…The Rhyme Zone.
The Measure of Things is a weird little website that offers comparative measurements. Did you know that 15 nautical miles is about three times as tall as Mount Everest? I feel like this would have been Terry Pratchett’s favorite thing if he was still around.
Copy and paste your writing into Cliché Finder to highlight any overused words or phrases, if that’s important to you.
Wavemaker is a powerful free tool for planning, structuring, and shuffling around all the bits of your novel. I’ll definitely be using this one in the future!
Finally, here are four “zenware” apps and downloads that turn your computer into a distraction-free, customized, calm environment for focused writing:

I truly hope this was helpful! Don’t forget to check out the previous writer resource posts here on Soft Hobbies. Leave a comment and let me know which one you’re most excited about using. I’m wishing you all the best in your writing endeavors!

Softly yours,

Auzin