Best Books for Writers

From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.

  • 12 Short Stories and Their Making

    by
    Paul Mandelbaum, editor
    Published in 2005
    by Persea Books

    In this anthology edited by Paul Mandelbaum, each short story is accompanied by an interview with the author discussing the challenges they faced during the writing process. Each story is selected not only for its singular style but for its exemplary illustration of one of the six elements of fiction: character, plot, theme, structure, voice, and setting. Included are Ursula K. Le Guin on the Antarctic setting of her short story “Sur,” Gail Godwin on the structure of her short story “Dream Children” and her favorite ghost stories, and Allan Gurganus on the point of view and voice in his short story “Condolences to Every One of Us.” For writers of fiction and readers alike, this unique collection of short stories and interviews will shed light on both the technical and inspirational elements behind crafting great fiction.  

  • And Then We Grew Up: On Creativity, Potential, and the Imperfect Art of Adulthood

    by
    Rachel Friedman
    Published in 2019
    by Penguin Books

    Rachel Friedman, author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure, follows up with a memoir meets writer’s guidebook addressing the realities of an artist’s life. Friedman looks back to her childhood fantasies of being an artist and consults with former classmates from Interlochen Arts Camp, a prestigious summer music and arts camp she attended as an eleven-year-old in Michigan, to find out how their early creative ambitions translated into adult careers, relationships, and lifestyles. Featuring playful chapter titles such as “On ‘Making It,’” “Never Compromise! (But Definitely Compromise),” and “The Kingdom of Ordinary Time,” Friedman combines personal conversations with critical, practical advice on how to build a sustainable life as an artist, illustrating the many forms creativity can take. “We can broaden our notion of achievement—not in the Instagrammable, ‘look at me having it all’ sort of way,” writes Friedman. “This is not magical thinking. It’s simply embracing the whole range of experiences, not just the heightened or overly artistic ones. It’s being a curious, observant traveler in your own life.”   

  • The Story About the Story II: Great Writers Explore Great Literature

    by
    J. C. Hallman, editor
    Published in 2013
    by Tin House

    This second volume of The Story About the Story edited by author and essayist J. C. Hallman continues to address and exemplify the idea of a “creative criticism,” one that allows for a personal perspective when writing about reading. As Hallman writes in the introduction, the book includes “writers who think that writing about literature ought to be art itself, ought to have all of the power and sensuousness of a great piece of literature, ought to be a little bit sexy maybe, or at least feel alive.” This collection includes essays by contemporary writers on the writing of canonical authors, such as Zadie Smith on Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Baxter on Anton Chekhov, Francisco Goldman on Robert Bolaño, and Margaret Atwood on H. G. Wells. Altogether, this volume of over twenty essays offers a rare occasion for readers to not only absorb lessons on the elements of great fiction, but on what makes literary criticism great.  

  • Guard the Mysteries

    by
    Cedar Sigo
    Published in 2021
    by Wave Books

    In this collection of five lectures delivered for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry, Cedar Sigo traces the literary and cultural influences that form his poetic voice. Through criticism, poetic analysis, and personal narrative, Sigo discusses his relationship to poetry through the works of writers such as Diane di Prima, Barbara Guest, Joanne Kyger, and Audre Lorde. “Poetry is never simply a set of words living alone upon the page. It exists as a perennial light in the mind, a tool of recognition that we must press into the hands of others,” Sigo writes in the opening piece “Reality Is No Obstacle: A Poetics of Participation.” In this intimate and intellectually stimulating collection, Sigo writes from the intersections of his identity as a queer Suquamish poet to chart new possibilities for what is understood as poetic craft in the western world.   

  • The Forest for the Trees (Revised and Updated): An Editor’s Advice to Writers

    by
    Betsy Lerner
    Published in 2010
    by Riverhead Books

    “This is not a book about how to write,” says author, editor, and literary agent Betsy Lerner in this guide for writers. “I offer advice to writers whose neuroses seem to get in their way, those who sabotage their efforts, those who have met with some success but are stalled between projects.” In this book organized into two sections titled “Writing” and “Publishing,” Lerner starts with the creative side of the publishing process categorizing writers into archetypes: “The Ambivalent Writer,” “The Natural,” “The Wicked Child,” “The Self-Promoter,” and “The Neurotic.” In addressing different personalities and ways a writer might be blocked, Lerner aims to show how a writer’s style on and off the page can work in tandem. The second half of the book includes essential information on how to seek agents, handle rejection, promote your book, and understand what editors are seeking. Drawing from her experience as a writer and teacher of writing workshops as well as an editor and agent, Lerner offers an insider’s perspective on the life of a writer and ways to overcome and confront the demons that may be in the way.  

  • The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays

    by
    Garrett Hongo
    Published in 2017
    by University of Michigan Press

    “When I was twenty, I decided to dedicate myself to the study of art and literature. It would be as if I were an apprentice in some religious practice,” writes award-winning poet and scholar Garrett Hongo in “The Mirror Diary,” the title essay of this collection in which he tracks the emergence of his poetic voice through a secret diary he kept as a child filled with invented stories and memories about his ancestors. The essay sets the backdrop for this installment of the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press, which includes personal and craft essays such as “In the Bamboo Grove: Some Notes on the Poetic Line,” “The Activity of the Poet,” and “Homage to Lost Worlds: Where I Write, Why I Write There.” Hongo considers the multitude of perspectives and approaches to writing that he has inherited as he writes about his literary antecedents, including the poets of China’s T’ang Dynasty, American poets Charles Olson and Walt Whitman, and his contemporaries David Mura and Edward Hirsch. Hongo’s essays remind poets and readers of poetry to consider their own histories and draw inspiration from the wealth of literary traditions in the world when approaching the page.  

  • Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries

    by
    Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, editors
    Published in 2017
    by Graywolf Press

    This anthology of twenty-five poems, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, brings readers into the process and art of translating poetry into the English language. Contributors were asked to select one poem in another language, each translated into English by three different translators, and to write an essay about the challenges and rewards of translating it. The wide-format book displays the original poem and three translations side by side for readers to compare for themselves. The accompanying essays—written by working translators such as Willis Barnstone, Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Karen Emmerich, Carl Phillips, and Arthur Sze—provide an additional layer of historical context as well as discussions on word choice, tone, and other craft lessons on the art of translating poetry. Assembled in chronological order, the book features the original works of poets such as Basho, Rilke, Akhmatova, Szymborska, Amichai, and Adonis. Perfect for avid readers of poetry, translators, and writers across backgrounds, this unique anthology opens readers up to the rich possibilities within literary translation.  

  • The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling

    by
    Charles Johnson
    Published in 2016
    by Scribner

    “I wrote six unpublished novels between 1970 and 1972 before my debut novel, Faith and the Good Thing,” writes National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson in this book of craft essays on the life and practice of writing. The novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist shares personal stories and experiences gathered over decades of writing and teaching creative writing at the University of Washington in Seattle. Across six sections that move through the writing process to the writing life, Johnson offers utilitarian approaches to understanding dialogue, plot, and storytelling, and shares writing exercises from his classroom that help with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice, as well as lessons on being a writer in the world. The book serves as a guide for writers and offers a glimpse into the probing mind of a groundbreaking writer and scholar, inspiring readers to pick up the pen and tell their own stories.  

  • The Art of the Poetic Line

    by
    James Longenbach
    Published in 2007
    by Graywolf Press

    “Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines. More than meter, more than rhyme, more than images or alliteration or figurative language, line is what distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry,” writes James Longenbach in the preface to this installment of Graywolf’s Art of series. This thought-provoking writing guide breaks down the historical and technical aspects of the practice of lineation with an examination of metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. Offering a range of examples—from the work of poets such as Frank Bidart, Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and C. D. Wright—Longenbach makes the art of the poetic line approachable as he simultaneously challenges preconceived notions of how it is understood. Whether for the poet, the curious prose writer, or the poetry reader, this book will expand the lexicon and understanding of the musicality behind all writing.  

  • Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature

    by
    Charles Baxter
    Published in 2022
    by Graywolf Press

    In this collection of essays on the craft of writing fiction, Charles Baxter reflects on a life of writing, thinking through such topics as charisma, narrative urgency, how request moments function in a story, the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of fabulist writers, and the plausibility of dreams. As with Baxter’s other nonfiction books, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext, the longtime teacher and celebrated author offers his unique observations and lessons on what makes good fiction come to life in these craft and personal essays. “Many of our models for writing and for thinking about plot and plot construction go back to common questions: What does this character want? Or: What is this character afraid of?” writes Baxter in the introductory essay. “Partial truths can quickly turn into rule-of-thumb conventions and then into clichés. Literature doesn’t always work through simple desires and fears because real life doesn’t always work that way.”   

  • How to Read Now

    by
    Elaine Castillo
    Published in 2022
    by Viking

    The author of the novel America Is Not the Heart, published in 2018 by Viking, returns with a collection of essays exploring the power and potential of a more engaged mode of reading that pulls together literature’s personal and shared histories. Attempting to deepen the aspirational claim that reading builds empathy and books can save lives, Castillo encourages us to acknowledge complicated truths (“the way we read now is simply not good enough, and it is failing not only our writers—especially, but not limited to, our most marginalized writers—but failing our readers, which is to say, ourselves,” she writes) and to forge deeper connections. An intensely personal history of one writer’s reading life and a wide-ranging intervention into our conversations about why reading matters, Castillo’s book urges us to create a space where literature truly imbues our lives with more meaning.  

  • Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors

    by
    Jewell Parker Rhodes
    Published in 1999
    by Main Street Books

    “Words have power. If we don’t tell our own stories, then the historical ‘gaps,’ the ‘silences’ become ripe for someone else’s lies, distortions, half-truths,” writes Jewell Parker Rhodes in this guide to writing fiction which celebrates Black authors and storytelling. In each chapter, Rhodes offers a step-by-step introduction to the fundamentals of writing, including advice on how to begin a journaling practice and emotionally prepare before writing, the importance of reading, creating character and plot, and knowing when to stop revising. Rhodes fills the book with writing prompts and inspiring passages from authors such as Toni Cade Bambara, Randall Kenan, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker, illustrating what powerful and skilled writing looks like. There is also a reading list, writing resources, and a glossary of essential fictional terms in the last section of the book. Rhodes encourages writers to investigate, study, and keep going: “Good writers probe themselves and their world; good writers laugh and cry; good writers observe; good writers don’t just talk about writing, they write.”  

  • When the Rewards Can Be So Great: Essays on Writing and the Writing Life

    by
    Kwame Dawes, editor
    Published in 2016
    by 1849 Editions

    “Here and there, we find these gems, these glittering gems of pure delight in the art, and they remind us of why we do this work, why we keep coming back to make this art that we do, why we keep trying,” writes Kwame Dawes in the preface to this collection of craft talks on writing and the writing life delivered by faculty at the Pacific University MFA in Writing program. Organized into three sections titled “Reflections on the Writing Life,” “Reflections on the Writing Process,” and “Reflections on the Nuts and Bolts of Writing,” the essays express both the personal and technical aspects of being a writer in the world. Featuring essays by Ellen Bass, Marvin Bell, Pam Houston, Dorianne Laux, and Mike Magnuson, among others, this collection offers writers of all backgrounds insight from a range of voices and styles that make up a community enriched by writing. As Dawes writes, “What we bring is our own distinctive history, our own narrative of struggle and triumph in the making of our art, and our satchels full of the wisdom and empathy that other writers have given to us.”  

  • Storyville!: An Illustrated Guide to Writing Fiction

    by
    John Dufresne, illustrated by Evan Wondolowski
    Published in 2020
    by Norton

    “You need at least two skills to be a fiction writer. You have to be able to write and you have to be able to tell a story. Telling a story is the harder skill to master,” writes John Dufresne in the introduction to this guide to writing fiction, illustrated by Evan Wondolowski. The book emphasizes the importance of revision and the chaos that can come along with the writing process. The four chapters, “The Fiction Writer,” “The Fiction Writing,” “The Plot,” and “The Revision,” along with the playful illustrations and infographics offer writers a manual for the building blocks of fiction, which include showing how traditional plots rise and fall on a graph and comparing a story to an iceberg—10 percent living above the surface and 90 percent below the surface. Ideal for writers of all levels, this guide also includes original prompts and exercises that walk writers through the daunting prospects of the blank page.  

  • The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity

    by
    Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López, editors
    Published in 2011
    by University of Arizona Press

    “The impulse to define and neatly categorize the Latino experience not only shapes the way that Latino literature is understood; it influences what is available to us, what is acceptable to publishers, and what is read in the classroom,” write editors Blas Falconer and Lorraine M. López in the introduction to this 2011 anthology of twenty essays exploring the many ways in which Latinx American literature is understood. The essays—written by authors such as Joy Castro, Daniel Chacón, Alex Espinoza, Carmen Giménez Smith, Gabe Gomez, and Judith Ortiz Cofer—range in topics, some focusing on experiences that challenge what many perceive to be a Latinx narrative, while others encourage new modes of expression and push to reinvent literature that steps outside of traditional narratives, themes, and tropes. The anthology aims to shine a light on the diversity within diversity and to challenge writers to explore their own individuality. As Falconer and López write: “Only when we honor the multiplicity of voices in our cultural group can we honor the artistic spirit that drives us to create, as our first complex and original creation must be the self.”  

  • Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

    by
    bell hooks
    Published in 1999
    by Henry Holt

    “Writing about writing is one way to grasp, hold, and give added meaning to a process that remains one of life’s great mysteries,” writes the late bell hooks in the preface to this seminal collection of essays on the joys of reading and writing, and the power of the written word. In her essays “Writing Without Labels,” “Writing Autobiography,” and “Class and the Politics of Writing,” the trailblazing author, cultural critic, and professor offers a response to those that “find my (a Black woman writer) passion for the written word suspect.” The collection also includes deep readings of the works of writers such as Emily Dickinson, Lorraine Hansberry, Toni Morrison, and Zora Neale Hurston, women writers who influenced and shaped the author’s own voice by going against the grain. Through moving reflections and sharp language, this essay collection is ideal for any writer seeking a model for what the life of a working writer can look like and the ways in which writing can go beyond an expression of oneself. As hooks writes: “I have not yet found words to truly convey the intensity of this remembered rapture—that moment of exquisite joy when necessary words come together and the work is complete, finished, ready to be read.”  

  • Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End

    by
    Barbara Herrnstein Smith
    Published in 2007
    by University of Chicago Press

    “There is a distinction, however, between concluding and merely stopping or ceasing. The ringing of a telephone, the blowing of the wind, the babbling of an infant in its crib: these stop. A poem or a piece of music concludes,” writes Barbara Herrnstein Smith in this collection of essays examining the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. Smith breaks down the techniques and craft elements behind some of twentieth century’s most celebrated poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Stanley Kunitz, Dylan Thomas, and William Butler Yeats to exemplify elements of prosody present in these works. The book concludes with a section on the problems of closures, including chapters titled “Failures of Closure” and “Closure and Anti-Closure in Modern Poetry,” leaving readers with new questions and possibilities to carry forward into their own writing process.  

  • As We Were Saying: Sewanee Writers on Writing

    by
    Wyatt Prunty, Megan Roberts, and Adam Latham, editors
    Published in 2021
    by Louisiana State University Press

    This anthology edited by Wyatt Prunty, Megan Roberts, and Adam Latham collects craft talks about the writing process delivered at the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference held on the campus of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. The essays by noted authors—Richard Bausch, Mary Jo Salter, Randall Kenan, William Logan, Alice McDermott, and Christine Schutt, among others—cover topics such as narrative structure, characterization in fiction and nonfiction, writing a plot in poems, revision, and the fundamentals of a metaphor. Catered for writers at all levels of experience, the essays are written in response to questions generated by the process of writing by, as the editors write in the introduction, “masters of a craft candidly reporting issues they confront as they begin, pause, worry, resume, stop, despair, resolve, revise, finish. Revise again.”   

  • The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews

    by
    Harryette Mullen
    Published in 2012
    by University of Alabama Press

    “About one-third of my pleasure as a writer comes from the work itself, the process of writing, a third from the response of my contemporaries, and another third in contemplating unknown readers who inhabit a future I will not live to see,” writes Harryette Mullen in “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” the first essay in this collection of short and long essays and interviews by the poet and scholar. Through literary analysis and detailed self-reflection, Mullen tracks the thematic and formal concerns of her work as well as the work of African American writers, including Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook and Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti. This thoughtful collection offers a glimpse into Mullen’s methods and drive for writing to those interested in the tools necessary to innovate and challenge their own writing.   

  • A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing

    by
    David Mura
    Published in 2018
    by University of Georgia Press

    In this collection of essays, poet, memoirist, and critic David Mura uses his many years of experience as a teacher of creative writing to dissect timeless and timely aspects of writing fiction and nonfiction as a writer of color. “The purpose of this book is to instruct writers about their craft, particularly fiction writers and writers of memoir as well as creative writing teachers,” writes Mura in the introduction. Organized into five sections, including an appendix of writing assignments, the book explores topics within the writing community with chapters such as “The Student of Color in the Typical MFA Program” and “On Race and Craft: Tradition and the Individual Talent Revisited,” and provides an examination of narrative and identity in memoir writing with close studies of the work of writers including James Baldwin, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston, and ZZ Packer. A rigorous mix of memoir and guidebook, A Stranger’s Journey offers readers, as Mura puts it, “a seminal guide to their own transformative journey.” 

  • On Becoming a Poet

    by
    Susan Terris, editor
    Published in 2022
    by Marsh Hawk Press

    “While modern creative writing programs seek to develop the talents of maturing writers, essential information about the initiation, development and processes of the writing craft can be discovered in the early memories of established writers—material that has not usually been available in the classroom,” writes poet and editor Susan Terris in the introduction to this unique anthology of essays and interviews of acclaimed poets, including Denise Duhamel, Rafael Jesús González, Jane Hirshfield, Arthur Sze, and Lynne Thompson. The twenty-five poets in this collection tackle topics such as how they found their poetic voice, how they dealt with racial and gender discrimination, and how they keep writing despite rejection and disappointment. Through these intimate essays and interviews, one can see that there is more than one way to become a poet and that, quite often, true inspiration comes from the most unlikely places. 

  • The Heart of American Poetry

    by
    Edward Hirsch
    Published in 2022
    by Library of America

    “This is a personal book about American poetry, but I hope it is more than a personal selection,” writes critic and poet Edward Hirsch in the introduction to this Library of America anthology with essays reflecting on forty poems that have made an impact on his life and how they might help guide and connect readers through difficult times. Featuring the work of poets such as Anne Bradstreet, Julia de Burgos, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Langston Hughes, and Phillis Wheatley, each essay both carefully contextualizes the biography of the poet with the chosen piece and analyzes in detail the language and mechanics driving the emotion behind each poem. Hirsch’s expertise and adoring relationship with verse shines through in every essay, as he makes clear why poetry matters. “There is a conversation in American poetry that is also a colloquial about American life,” writes Hirsch. “Each individual poet, wittingly or unwittingly, consciously or unconsciously, contributes to this exchange and discussion.”  

  • About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews

    by
    Samuel R. Delany
    Published in 2006
    by Wesleyan University Press

    “Though vast numbers of people want to write fiction, the educational machinery set in place to teach people how doesn’t work very well. While this book puts forth no strategies for correcting the situation, it discusses some reasons why this is the case,” writes award-winning novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany in the introduction to this 2006 book on the mechanics of fiction. A professor of literature and creative writing for many decades, Delany discusses the art of writing fiction—through essays, personal letters to other writers, and interviews—as well as examines the conditions of the contemporary writer, explaining why literary reputations grow differently today than they did “twenty-five, thirty-five, and seventy-five years ago.” Organized in three parts, About Writing does more than offer basic elements of creative writing, it gives clear guidance on the life of a writer. As Delany puts it, this is a book for “writers who are not interested in formulaic imitation, at whatever level, however well done.”  

  • Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition: Toward a 21st Century Poetics

    by
    Rigoberto González
    Published in 2017
    by University of Michigan Press

    “I have always contended that the most important work being done today is in the field of ethnic letters. I’d like to add that within that field, the most critical pressure point pulses from the queer body of color—its representation and its cultural production,” writes Rigoberto González in the introduction to this collection of essays focused exclusively on writers of color, and particularly on Latino poetry. Divided into three sections—Critical Essays, Critical Reviews, and Critical Grace Notes—the collection discusses the works of contemporary writers such as Eduardo C. Corral, Natalie Diaz, Aracelis Girmay, and J. Michael Martinez along with venerable writers including Francisco X. Alarcón, Robert Hayden, and Juan Felipe Herrera. This installment of the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press demonstrates how writers who represent marginalized communities continue to reorient the direction of American poetry, and delivers rigorous, critical writing that will inspire generations of writers to come.  

  • In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

    by
    Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
    Published in 2022
    by Europa Editions

    “I’m going to talk to you about the desire to write and about the two kinds of writing it seems to me I know best, the first compliant, the second impetuous,” writes Elena Ferrante to begin the first of the four essays in this slim but powerful collection by the author of the Neapolitan novels. Composed as lectures—the first three for the Umberto Eco Lectures series sponsored by the International Center for Humanities of the University of Bologna, the fourth for the Dante and Other Classics conference presented by the Association of Italianists—these pieces offer a look at Ferrante’s influences and inspirations as well as probing discussions of the work of Ingeborg Bachmann, Emily Dickinson, María Guerra, Gertrude Stein, and others. 

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