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Home » Tools for Writers » The Time Is Now » Best Books for Writers
Best Books for Writers
From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.
Author of the classic Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg offers another writing guide based on her forty years of teaching small, intensive workshops at a remote center in the rural Southwest. In chapters with titles such as "Why Silence?," "Meditation (Sitting)," "Seven Attitudes of Mindfulness," and "Six-Word Memoir," Goldberg shares her insights about finding truth and clarity on the way to establishing a literary life. |
Written by poet and critic James Logenbach, this collection of twelve essays explores various ways that poetry at its most successful delivers meaning. Longenbach uses as examples poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery, among other greats. |
An anthology of essays by poets such as Kazim Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nick Flynn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Rankine, and Alissa Valles whose travels have informed their writing. The book also includes practical resources for finding work abroad, applying for fellowships and residencies, funding a trip, obtaining proper travel documents, and attending to other cultural considerations. |
In Vivid and Continuousseasoned fiction writer and teacher John McNally, who is also the author of The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide, offers solutions to the problems beginning fiction writers face. Each of the fifteen chapters includes writing exercises meant to reinforce McNally’s guidance. |
New York Times notable author David Corbett offers a unique and indispensable toolkit for creating characters that come vividly to life on the page and linger in memory. Corbett delves into the human heart of characterization, showing beginning and advanced writers how to plumb the rich source materials of their own lives and the world around them to fashion credible, compelling characters. |
Based on a series of his lectures, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler provides in-depth guidance about how to fully develop one's fiction. Butler's advice stems from his belief that "art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where we dream." |
Writer, editor, and teacher William Zinsser offers straightforward advice to the beginning writer about the principles of what makes strong nonfiction. Topics include style, voice, audience, and structure, and Zinsser breaks down the art of the interview, the travel essay, and the memoir. |
Based on a series of lectures Canadian author Margaret Atwood delivered at the University of Cambridge in 2000, this book comprises six essays that explore the role of the writer—especially the woman writer—in society. Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and nonfiction and is best known for her novels. Her many literary accolades include the Governor General's Award in 1985 for her novel The Handmaid's Tale (McClelland and Stewart) and the Man Booker Prize in 2000 for her novel The Blind Assassin (McClelland and Stewart). |
Poet W. T. Pfefferle take a roadtrip across the United States to interview America's poets about how they relate to where they live and how it informs their poetry. The interviews, some of which originally appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, feature poets such as Marvin Bell, Lucy Brock-Broido, Rita Dove, Linda Gregerson, Carol Muske-Dukes, Paisley Rekdal, Alberto Rios, Mark Strand, Karen Volkman, and more. |
Edited by Robert Atwan, with an introduction by David Brooks, this collection continues the series launched in 1986. It includes essays by writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, Sandra Tsing Loh, Francine Prose, and Wesley Yang. |