Best Books for Writers

In this updated, tenth anniversary edition of Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach and Kristen Keckler offer techniques and advice for writing creative nonfiction and how to begin writing about your life experiences. The book includes prompts, such as drawing maps of remembered neighborhoods and reflecting on old photographs, as well as considerations of the ethics of creative nonfiction, trends in the memoir genre, and practical guidance on background research, character development, and shaping compelling scenes.
 

“I dreamed of a book like a friend also traveling through the night, a friend with a compass, and secrets to share about her own experience,” writes Bonnie Friedman in the introduction to Writing Past Dark, which she hopes will act as a supportive companion for writers. In this essay collection about the emotional side of the writing life, Friedman explores, and offers strategies for dealing with, an array of inner dilemmas that writers face, including feelings of envy, guilt, distraction, and writer’s block. Originally published in 1993, the collection may take on a new relevance in the current digital age, where literary successes, critiques, and debates are regularly shared publicly.

Thomas C. Foster, professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, provides an in-depth examination of the inner workings of the poetic form through the lens of the inquisitive reader. In fifteen chapters split into the three sections (What Is Poetry?, How Is Poetry?, and Why Is Poetry?), Foster explores the ways technical elements like sound, sense, rhythm, symbols, imagery, and music are crafted by the poet in order to inform the audience’s reading experience. With knowledgeable insights and explanations, the book offers poets of all levels a refreshed perspective of their own writing.

In Behind the Book, Chris Mackenzie Jones, marketing and communications director at the Loft Literary Center, examines the complete writing and publishing timelines of debut books by authors of various genres, including Brian Benson, Edan Lepucki, Courtney Maum, Eric Smith, and Monona Wali. From generating ideas and writing process, to revision and polishing, to publication and its aftermath, this book assists writers in navigating the many potential paths and strategies for successfully publishing a first book.

“Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses, including deaths.” In The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat shifts from a memoiristic account of dealing with her mother’s death, to examining how other authors, poets, and philosophers have used literature to make sense of death, loss, mourning, and finding peace. Writers can find inspiration in Danticat’s insights on the value that integrating themes of sorrow and renewal can bring to a work of literature and its creator.

The author of a dozen books of poetry as well as three books about poetry, including Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Orr delivers an innovative and accessible guide based on the notion of turning “worlds into words,” using close readings of poems such as Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” The primer also provides a dozen writing exercises and a glossary of terms that is useful for new and emerging poets alike.

Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology combines elements of an introductory textbook, encyclopedia, and anthology into one comprehensive volume on the craft of poetry. Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko provide in-depth discussions of thirty-eight components of poetry, in alphabetical order from ambiguity to work, that they consider “the building materials and tools every poet relies on when making a poem.” The anthology section covers twenty poetic modes (list poems, love poems, and protest poems to name a few), each illustrated with acclaimed contemporary poetry by poets including Natalie Diaz, Terrance Hayes, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong.

In The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction, Michael Noll presents as single excerpted page from forty different contemporary novels and short stories in order to examine and point out specific writing techniques. These insightful discussions and analyses are followed by practical writing prompts and exercises, such as how to “write pretty” or how to “move through time space,” that will motivate writers to approach their craft with refreshed perspective.

“When we have a problem, we look for advice—what do others do? Not so we can replicate their strategies, but so we can listen, consider, begin to make wordless decisions deep in the cerebral mass. It is the conversation that is useful, rather than the single instruction,” writes Susan Grimm in her introduction to Ordering the Storm. The book is comprised of essays by eleven poets, including Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and Bonnie Jacobson, reflecting on the process of assembling a collection of poetry. The essays offer a range of perspectives and approaches to the task of arranging poems while providing a sense of community with each voice and insight.

In From Language to Creative Writing, Philip Seargeant and Bill Greenwell combine language studies and the practice of creative writing to create an informative and useful guide for writers interested in manipulating the structures of the English language for the purpose of crafting poetry and prose. Chapters cover topics such as “Speech and conversation,” “Context, time and point of view,” and “‘Literary’ language,” and include exemplary passages as well as writing activities and exercises.

The new edition of The Reader Over Your Shoulder, a restoration of the complete original 1943 handbook written in response to the tumult of World War II, discusses major stylistic elements, peculiarities, and uses and abuses of English prose. Poet and novelist Robert Graves and historian Alan Hodge provide forty-one basic principles of writing focused on producing clarity and grace of expression, and a thorough section of correctives for common errors using examples from texts by leading authors of their era (Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw).

“A brilliant writer is someone who is devoted to expressing their creativity through the written word. Devotion is the key.” In twelve chapters, each one corresponding to a different month, poet, author, and teacher Albert Flynn DeSilver guides writers through a yearlong transformation and awakening of one’s creative process. Focusing on strengthening storytelling skills through the integration of life and art, the book includes numerous reading, writing, and meditative exercises, and explores topics such as poetic language, imagery, humor, the five senses, and revision.