Best Books for Writers

“When we write a personal narrative we find new meanings and, at the same time, we discover connections with our former selves. I think all writing constitutes an effort to establish our own meaningfulness, even in the midst of sadness and disappointment.” Jane Taylor McDonnell’s guide to the memoir form provides tips, strategies, and exercises that will inspire writers to excavate personal history and shape—and reshape—memories into powerful storytelling. Also included is a list of recommended reading.

“There is no such thing as being done with an artistic life. Frustrations and rewards exist at all levels on the path. Our aim here is to find the trail, establish our footing, and begin the climb.” In this twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Artist’s Way, which includes a new introduction, Julia Cameron guides writers and artists through a twelve-week process of building and strengthening a creative life through the use of her two primary tools—the morning pages and the artist date—along with hundreds of inspiring exercises and activities.

H. K. Hummel and Stephanie Lenox introduce “writing that prioritizes brevity over page count, compression over expansion, and distillation of image and voice over development of plot and character” in this comprehensive book with helpful sections on narrative voice, time and space, sentence structure, logic, humor, revision, and other integral elements of craft specifically geared toward the short creative prose form. The guide is filled with writing exercises and prompts, and includes an anthology of over fifty exemplary short-form pieces by authors such as Matt Bell, Lydia Davis, Natalie Diaz, Amy Hempel, Jamaica Kincaid, Ada Limón, Justin Torres, and Ocean Vuong.

“This is not a book of theory. It is a book of usable solutions—how to fix writing that is flawed, how to improve writing that is good, how to create interesting writing in the first place.” In this practical and comprehensive book on writing prose, author and editor Sol Stein provides a guide through the essential concerns of craft: intentions, plotting, tension and suspense, dialogue, sensory description, revision, and more. The book covers both fiction and nonfiction, as well as overlapping elements, and is full of anecdotes and exemplary passages from other works of literature.

An acclaimed poet and critic who regularly writes reviews for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the New York Times Book Review, Craig Morgan Teicher assembles here a fascinating collection of essays that trace the poetic development of luminaries such as Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, W. S. Merwin, and francine j. harris, exploring how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some of them are able to create works that stand the test of time. “I do hope,” Teicher writes, “that these investigations of various poets’ development offer other writers ways of thinking about how life and art—and how art and artists—affect one another.”

In Understanding the Essay, Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter have gathered the work of a wide range of acclaimed essayists, including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Jamaica Kincaid, George Orwell, David Foster Wallace, and Virginia Woolf. Each writer is introduced with a contextual biography, followed by a piece by another essayist—such as Eula Biss writing about Anne Carson’s “On Trout,” Patricia Hampl writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” and Phillip Lopate writing about William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating”—which offers insightful analysis of a specific essay, and refreshing perspectives on the possibilities of the form.

“By giving form to devastation, the poem rescues the reader from a darkness without shape or gravity; it is an island in a free fall; it becomes his companion in grief, his rescuer, a proof that suffering can be made somehow to yield to meaning.” Louise Glück’s second book of essays is both conversational and erudite, discussing new and emerging literary figures of American poetry and topics such as originality, narcissism, and healing. The book also includes a section with introductions to the first books of poets Ken Chen, Dana Levin, Spencer Reece, Richard Siken, and others.

With Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, author Jessica Brody has reimagined Blake Snyder’s best-selling screenwriting guide Save the Cat! (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005) and adapted it for novel writing. Brody outlines fifteen essential plot points integral for structuring a compelling story, and using a wide range of examples from literature—including books by Margaret Atwood, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tana French, Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, Angie Thomas, and Alice Walker—covers topics from the ten universal story genres, to the basics of writing heroes and villains, detectives and underdogs, road trips and quests, and love and friendship.

“The critic is a reader before he is a writer, a spirited lover of literature, and criticism is one important use to which he puts his reading and his love,” William Giraldi writes in the introduction to his collection of essays on American writers, literary critics, and cultural themes spanning several decades. In the book’s three sections—American Moments, American Critics, and American Stories—Giraldi discusses Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, Katie Roiphe, Cormac McCarthy, Allan Gurganus, and Elizabeth Spencer, among others, as well as topics such as commercial fiction, Catholic novelists, bibliophilia, and the art of hate mail.

The author or editor of seventeen books, including The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide: Advice From an Unrepentant Novelist (2010) and Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction (2013), both also published by the University of Iowa Press, McNally returns with a book that mixes thoughtful advice, tips on craft, and memoir of the writing life with humor and honesty. Using his own life as a blueprint, McNally navigates thorny issues such as how to know when to quit and when to persevere as well as how to deal with depression as a creative person and ways to energize your writing through reinvention.

With The Writer’s Portable Mentor, Priscilla Long has written a comprehensive manual covering integral topics in chapters such as “Daily Writing,” “Working With Language,” “Dramatic Story Structure,” “Transitions,” and “Metaphor and Simile.” In this second edition, Long has replaced exemplary sentences and passages with revelatory new models, and updated sections to reflect how writing and publishing practices have evolved since the 2010 edition, including changes in the average length of stories, scientific findings about handwriting versus typing, and perceptions about self-publishing.