Below, you will find a complete list of the HPFF Writers' Guild resources, from workshops to external resources, sorted in a table of contents.
Workshops
All workshops are available on The Guild's AO3. They were written and hosted by @venom0usbarbie, @lunapwrites, @allalrightagain, @girl-with-goats, @inmyownlittlecorner5, @bluestringpudding and @voldylockswrites.
They're sorted into two categories: writing workshops and poetry jams.
Writing Workshops
A collection with all the workshops can be found here.
Who's Speaking? A Workshop on Characterisation
Tools of the Trade - A Literary Device Workshop
Alternate Universes: the Workshop
From Fic to Best-Seller: a Marketing Workshop
The Subtle Science of Prep
Grammar Crash Course
Workbuilding Workshop
Smut Workshop
Riddles of the Human Mind
Shades of Grey: Dark & Grey Character Creation
Whose Point of View is it Anyway? A POV Workshop
In Tune with Words: Exploring the Intersection Between Music and Writing
Show and Tell Workshop
An Introduction to Plot-Driven Smut: an NSFW Workshop
Flow May - A Punctuation Workshop
Play with Your Words - A Workshop on Descriptive Writing
The Writer's Guide to Baking an Original Character
January Poetry Jams
A collection with all the poetry jams can be found here.
Poetry Jam #1
Poetry Jam #2
Poetry Jam #3
Poetry Jam #4
Poetry Jam #5
Tagging Guide
Barbie's handy tagging guide is on the Guild's AO3 as well.
You can also peruse the HPFF Writers' Guild — Workshops and Guides and Other Resources tag on AO3 to track down all our AO3 resources.
Drabble Workshops
There are seven drabble workshops, all of which can be found on Tumblr.
The Seven Deadly Drabbles
The Restricted Section
Sing Me a Song
Drabble Limbo
The Dementor's Kiss
Build-A-Story
That's What She Said
External Resources
Masterposts
Directory
Spreadsheet
Individual post links
Harry Potter-focused Resources
Language and Grammar
Plotting, Outlining, and Worldbuilding
Character Building
Technical Tools & Guides and General Writing Resources
A Halloween-themed drabble workshop hosted by @lunapwrites on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From October 25th to October 31st, 2024
For the next seven days I will be providing the following:
a subgenre prompt
a theme prompt
a series of word prompts
These prompts are entirely optional, and are there for vibes only. I will also be providing the wikipedia links to all of the different subgenres so you get an idea of what you're aiming for.
The goal is to write something each day that fits the bill in 100-400 words. Also, yes, you can use this towards your WAT sprints, if you're participating this weekend.
If you have any questions, let me know!
DAY 1
GENRE
Folk Horror
THEME
There's something wrong about this place...
PROMPTS
wicked
ritual
secret
whispers
isolation
DAY 2
GENRE
Dark Fantasy
Gothic
THEME
You hear the storm roll in overhead; looks like you're stuck here...
A drabble workshop hosted by @bluestringpudding on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From June 16th to June 20th, 2025
It’s a simple workshop, mostly just chance for everyone to have fun, and maybe get a bit more experience of writing NSFW content within a safe environment. The prompts will be silly. But that doesn’t mean that the drabbles have to be. If you’d like to write something more serious, or more sensual, I’d love to read them.
That being said, there will be a few simple rules to follow:
Submissions must be no more than 200 words.
It doesn't have to be Harry Potter based. Any and all fandoms are welcome (though if context is required, I might ask questions). Or it can be based in no fandom at all.
Submissions must describe a complete moment, whether it is an act or a thought; there is a difference between leaving readers with a sense of anticipation and leaving them feeling unfulfilled.
If you’re down for an extra challenge, extra Kudos will awarded for anyone who manages to keep their word limit to 69 words.
If you're worried about the word count, here are some tips that may help (shamelessly copied from the excellent advice given for the last smut drabble workshop we held three years ago, thank you Jass 🤗 ):
Employ the power of suggestion: don't tell us what is, make us visualize it. Show us a tiny sliver. Draw us in.
To that end: play with imagery and the senses.
Metaphors will be your best friend. (Try to avoid similes; they add extra words and may not be as impactful in such a compact setting.) (These are not hard rules, just suggestions.)
A drabble workshop hosted by @venom0usbarbie on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From May 12th to May 15th, 2025
Introduction
Build-A-Story is designed as a way for you to think about story continuity amidst chaos. Rather than thinking in terms of plot, trope, or character development, you will be asked to construct individual stories that will end up making a cohesive narrative tied by themes, ideas, or imagery. You may end up with a different set of stories that function as bricks in the larger narrative of a single world, or have a sequence of vignettes that paint a whole story when stitched together, or manage to compose a single scene using all 4 drabbles, etc. There are a myriad of ways for you to create continuity using this workshop!
Before we get started, please make sure to read the rules and guidelines below carefully!
Each drabble will have a limit of 350 words.
Every day, you will be given a theme, a list of prompt words, and an additional challenge. You must use at least 1 prompt word and follow the theme. The additional challenge is optional, but following it is encouraged. Everything else is up to you.
Day 1. Overture
Theme
crisis of conscience
Prompt words
Sorrow
Blue
Bright
Memory
Repulsive
Steam
Additional challenge
You can only use two characters.
Day 2. Rise
Theme
immaterial loss (innocence, consciousness, faith, etc.)
Prompt words
Sway
Experience
Vest
Annoying
Liquid
Glass
Additional challenge
You must replace one of the characters of day 1 by a new character.
Day 3. Fall
Theme
joy
Prompt words
Rose
Orange
Glad
Callous
Earth
Dive
Additional challenge
Change the setting completely from the setting you picked on days 1 and 2.
Day 4. Finale
Theme
the abyss
Prompt words
Float
Prickly
Desire
Rat
Powder
Flavor
Additional challenge
Add a plot twist by determining how what you wrote previously could be foreshadowing.
A drabble workshop hosted by @allalrightagain on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From July 18th to July 20th, 2023
This week we’ll be playing Drabble Limbo, where the goal is to write progressively shorter fics, until you reach 100 words.
Each day you’ll be given a range to get your fic in, as well as a bonus challenge— an exact word count (and maybe a bonus bonus challenge or two). You do not have to hit the exact word count if you don’t want, but all submissions must be within that day’s assigned range.
As we go along I’ll be providing additional tips on how to tell a story with increasingly small word counts, and if you follow our tumblr there will be additional posts all week with other ideas to lower your word count.
Due to the nature of this workshop, these challenges must be completed in order (otherwise you aren’t really playing limbo, are you?)
Day One: You can write about anything, but make sure you like the idea, as you’ll be spending a lot of time with it over the next three days. Today’s drabble must be between 450 and 300 words, with a bonus challenge of exactly 375.
I highly recommend keeping today’s to a single image or short moment; remember, they’ll only get shorter from here!
Some things to keep in mind for today’s drabble:
Stick to a single image or moment. Don’t try to cram a whole conversation or plot in, but instead spend time filling in that moment.
Be prepared to kill your darlings. Sometimes you write an amazing sentence or phrase that you just can’t let go of, but when you start to edit, it doesn’t quite fit anymore. Feel free to save that sentence in its own doc for later so that you can make this drabble the best it can be (even without your darling).
Keep the number of characters limited. There are some great scenes with multiple characters in them, but it can be difficult to balance them equally, and even more so to do that in a limited number of words. Keeping your initial scene between 1-2 characters at most will give you breathing room as we get shorter and shorter.
I’ll leave you with some (optional) prompts to get the music started: Red Snow Laughter Shine Shadow Ache Smirk Party Low
Day Two: Write a fic with a word count between 300 and 200 words, with a bonus challenge of exactly 250.
You can choose to write a new fic if you desire, however, my recommendation is to continue working on Day One’s draft to get the full experience from this workshop.
Some things to focus on in your edits: * Eliminate weasel words or words that qualify or modify the rest of the statement, like “Usually,” “Could,” “Truly,” and filler words, “like,” “that,” “just,” that aren’t necessary to understand the rest of the sentence.
Replace longer verb phrases like “said quietly” with “whispered” or “hissed”, and otherwise drop adverbs that aren’t vital to the understanding of your sentence/drabble, “glanced quickly”, or “walked slowly”— in many cases you’ll find that the sentence reads just as clearly without them, or that there’s a single word that can fit the pace of several.
Rewrite passive voice and filtered POV— the “he thought”s and “she knew”s. When you’re in a character’s POV, you don’t typically need to tell the reader that the character is thinking/seeing/etc it. “She knew it was snowing” vs “it was snowing.” Passive voice is when the target of the action is the focus of the sentence, so “The house was cleaned by Harry” vs “Harry cleaned the house.” While both of these can be useful, you can also free up a lot of WC space by limiting their use.
(These suggestions are not intended to eliminate your voice as a writer or your characters’ voices, and you don’t have to follow every suggestion. That being said, with each round of edits your fic will get shorter, and that can mean losing phrases or whole lines you like, which can be disheartening. That’s ok! Feel free to save the good bits somewhere else so that you can focus on meeting the word count.)
Day Three: This time, write a fic with a word count less than 150 words, or, if you want an extra challenge, exactly 100 words.
You can choose to write a new fic if you desire, however, my recommendation is to continue working on Day One’s draft to get the full experience from this workshop.
I promised a extra bonus challenge for those who want to attempt it: we’ve been focused on editing down the drabble you’ve already written, but try adding something back in that wasn’t in your Day Two draft. Could be a sentence or a phrase from Day One or something completely new. Again, this is optional challenge, for bonus points which mean nothing but my admiration.
Some things to focus on in your edits:
Condense sentences-- Eliminating overlapping parts of sentences “He smiled at her. He knew this was the perfect date.” can be replaced by “He smiled at her; this was the perfect date.” or even further “He smiled at her— a perfect date.” Don’t be afraid to play around with formatting, punctuation, even fragments to make your point!
Contractions (or lack there of) can do a lot for showing little details about your character, both in dialogue and narration. However, they can also contribute to longer sentences. Keeping in mind the voice you’re conveying, look through your draft for any words that could be contracted (do not->don’t, it is-> it’s). You probably won’t lose a lot of words here, but it’s also a great place to add them back in if you’re under a specific WC.
Rephrase dialogue. There’s many different ways to say the same thing, some of them longer or shorter, and while the way a person says something can tell readers a lot about them, roundabout ways of speaking “I will be communicating separately with each individual responsible,” vs “I’ll interrogate each one,” can take a lot of your word count, as can filler words like “um,” and “er.”
A drabble workshop hosted by @allalrightagain and @girl-with-goats on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From August 22nd to August 28th, 2022
Introduction
Each day, we’ll be posting two songs to use as a drabble prompt. We’ll also be adding them to a spotify playlist as we go.
How will it work? 🎶 You can take these prompts in any direction, just let us know which song you picked and make sure that you’re posting in the-love-chamber or the-death-chamber, spoilering it, and providing relevant tags if necessary.
🎶 Maximum word count is 300, but no minimum— as long as you can tell your story, go as short as you’d like! (For those who love challenge, you may choose to write 69 words… )
🎶 To create the story, you can take either the lyrics of the song, some part of them, the melody, the mood, or the vibes, or everything at once—whatever is your jam
🎶 As always, workshops are here as inspiration at any time, but please only submit one work per day of prompts until the workshop is complete— that’s per set of songs-- but feel free to double back after Sunday.
🎶 There's absolutely no pressure–the challenge is supposed to be fun. You can join any day you want, skip some songs if you dislike them, and come back later. You can also drop your drabbles here even after the workshop is done.
A drabble workshop hosted by @lunapwrites on the HPFF Writers' Guild Discord server
From February 7th to February 14th, 2022
This will be a NSFW drabble workshop in which I will provide you with a single-word prompt, and you will write a drabble around it. Simple, right? Not quite.
Here are the rules:
Submissions must be no more than 150 words. (You may try for 69 words exactly as a bonus challenge if you are feeling so inspired.)
Submissions must describe a complete moment, whether it is an act or a thought; there is a difference between leaving readers with a sense of anticipation and leaving them feeling unfulfilled.
If you're worried about the word count, here are some tips that may help:
Employ the power of suggestion: don't tell us what is, make us visualize it. Show us a tiny sliver. Draw us in.
To that end: play with imagery and the senses.
Poetry is illustrative and evocative. Remember what you learned last month.
Metaphors will be your best friend. (Try to avoid similes; they add extra words and may not be as impactful in such a compact setting.)
A drabble workshop hosted by @lunapwrites on the HPFF Writer's Guild Discord server
From October 17th to October 23rd, 2021
Instructions: you do not have to use all or even any of the prompts in italics, but it does need to be in theme. The theme can be as loose as you want (in this particular case, it doesn't need to be sexual!)
Max word count: 400. No minimum.
I. LUST red. silk. blood. touch. longing. heat. knife.
II. GLUTTONY orange. bite. savor. spice. sweet. hunger. choke.
III. GREED possession. hoard. gold. jewels. theft. wealth. more.
Over the five years of its existence, the Harry Potter Fanfiction Writers’ Guild has compiled and crowdsourced a comprehensive list of resources to help its writers out. Below, you’ll find a directory to these resources, as well as a link to a spreadsheet with all the resources linked and categorized.
Comprehensive Spreadsheet
See the spreadsheet here
Directory
Harry Potter-focused Resources
Language and Grammar
Plotting, Outlining, and Worldbuilding
Character Building
Technical Tools & Guides and General Writing Resources
Hi writers, bit of a bittersweet announcement today.
After some deep thought and many, many rounds of discussions amongst the mod team, we've made the decision to sunset The Guild at the end of July.
The long and short of it is that life got a bit bigger and busier for all of us than we'd ever anticipated. New jobs, new moves, new humans - and of course, doing all of that when the doing is harder than it's ever been before. With all of that going on, running a server like this to the standard that it deserves to be run is next to impossible. We don't have the bandwidth anymore to run, let alone build, the workshops we had ideas for. The changes we had planned to implement to make the server easier to navigate have been in limbo since last winter - it's disappointing for us that we couldn't swing everything we'd wanted to do, but it's also just not fair to all of you.
To that end: we will be continuing with the archival project, to move our resources off Discord and onto Ao3 and our Tumblr. We will have this completed before the server closes. We will also be having one final WAT in July as a send off on July 10-12. Hopefully this gives everyone the time they need to connect with everyone they want.
And on a personal note... I love the community that we've built here, and I'm extremely sad to see it go. And I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done, and the work all of you have done. I hope you are too. I hope that all of you can carve out some new pocket in fandom or writer space that will work for you the way it should. I hope that your pillow is always cool, that your socks never bunch up in the toes, that they never run out of your favorite treat. I hope life is kind to you.
Thank you so much for your support and your stories over the last five years. Take care of yourselves.
If you’re ignoring punctuation in your works right now, I promise, you are missing out on so much additional storytelling. Punctuation’s primary purpose (say that ten times fast), is to clarify your message. It’s the difference between,
“My parents, Jack and Jill…” (My parents, who are named Jack and Jill).
And,
“My parents, Jack, and Jill…” (My parents plus someone named Jack plus someone named Jill).
However, it also has the amazing ability to create tone and give the readers subtle hints at what they should be feeling in any situation. See:
“I washed the dishes, cleaned the floors, and made the bed while he walked the dog.” (We are all productive in this household.)
And,
“I washed the dishes, cleaned the floors, and made the bed. He walked the dog.” (I do so much more than him.)
One period can mean the difference between a casual tone, and something that holds tension.
Here’s another example:
“Cheryl said she’d be here, so she’ll be here.” (Cheryl made a promise, so I’m confident she’ll follow up on it. Holds a bit of defensiveness, as though the speaker is talking to someone doubting Cheryl.)
And,
“Cheryl said she’d be here. She’ll be here.” (Repetition and short sentences holds a sort of anxiety—speaker is trying to convince themselves that nothing bad has happened to Cheryl)
But this isn’t just true of dialogue. We can imbue tone through punctuation in description alone. This is one of my favourite descriptions from Jack Spratt Investigates the Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde:
“The years had been charitable to Mrs. Spratt, and despite her age she was as bright as a button and had certainly not lost any of her youthful zest. Jack put it down to quantity of children. It had either made her tough in old age or worn her out—if the latter, then without Jack and his nine elder siblings, she might have lived to one hundred ninety-six. She painted people’s pets in oils because ‘someone has to,’ collected small pottery animals, Blue Baboon LPs and Jellyman commemorative plates. She had been widowed seventeen years.”
Feel how that line at the end lands especially heavy after the chipper, short sentences and crisp punctuation of the description that came above it? Fforde ramps up the pacing in punchy lines throughout the beginning and middle, just to land a blow beneath our ribs at the end. A masterclass.
Play around with punctuation in your writing—see how you can change the tone, and how tone and pacing walk hand in hand (or run) to get their intentional message across.
