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From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.
Author and former editor Lynne Truss emphasizes the importance of using semicolons, commas, and other punctuation properly. Truss's historical anecdotes and witty examples make learning these rules enjoyable.
Author Steven Pressfield offers a practical guide to identify the enemy within and create a "battle plan" to overcome the obstacles faced in creative endeavors.
Author and memoirist Kerry Cohen offers advice and provides guidelines for depicting the characters in your memoir with honesty and compassion, including how to choose which secrets to reveal and how to render the people in your life artfully on the page.
The Write Crowd offers tips and examples of how writers contribute to the literary community, the success of others, and their own well-rounded writing life.
In the follow-up to Maps of the Imagination: Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi presents the similarities between writing and puzzle-making, as well as puzzle-solving.
Tin House Books has compiled an anthology of speeches made by renowned authors and storytellers from the lecture series at Literary Arts, which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year. Featured writers include Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Wallace Stegner.
Award-winning author Joyce Carol Oates answers essential questions about narrative craft, and provides valuable lessons on how language, ideas, and experience come together to create a work of art.
Unlike your typical dictionary, this one concerns itself primarily with the observable—from shapes, to buildings, to people. With a reverse definition-to-term format, it is easy to find the descriptive word you're seeking. This expanded and updated edition includes examples of passages from authors including Khaled Hosseini, Zadie Smith, and Donna Tartt.
Journalist and educator Roy Peter Clark offers examples from the tradition of short-form writing to help writers produce well-crafted prose with a limited word count.
Through personal stories, award-winning author Maxine Clair offers insight into the creative process, how to find your creative outlet, and how to trust moments of inspiration.
Author and high-wire artist Philippe Petit, best known for his walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974, shares his unconventional strategies and methods of practicing, problem-solving, and perfecting his craft. The ideas offered can be applied to various creative outlets including writing, music, and dance.
Actor and writer Stephen Fry invites reluctant and aspiring poets to discover writing poetry for pleasure and provides insights, exercises, and simple step-by-step advice.
Techniques taught by the renowned Gotham Writers' Workshop were compiled by the school's president, Alexander Steele. Included are explanations of the fundamental elements of fiction, writing exercises, and the complete text of Raymond Carver's short story Cathedral.
Memoirist Brenda Peterson and literary agent Sarah Jane Freymann offer advice on crafting a memoir culled from decades of experience. Also included are writing exercises, interviews with publishing experts, and information about indie publishing.
Author and writing instructor Barbara Abercrombie provides a year’s worth of writing exercises and prompts, as well as inspiring quotes and examples, to help writers break through the blocks that impede their writing progress.
As a professor of psychology at Harvard University, Steven Pinker approaches the English language from a scientific perspective. In The Sense of Style he provides examples, evidence, and reasoning to help writers apply the guidelines of usage judiciously and to craft clear, concise prose.
A Writer's Diary contains entries culled from Virginia Woolf's personal records, which she kept over a span of twenty-seven years. Included are writing exercises, notes on books she was reading, and accounts of people and scenes relevant to what she was writing at the time.
In A Novel Approach, Jack Woodville London offers advice to beginning and experienced writers on putting together the pieces that make up a well-crafted novel.
N. M. Gwynne's guide to writing is built around William Strunk's original 1918 essay on grammar, which E. B. White later expanded. Using an old-school approach, Gwynne instructs readers on how to put words together correctly.
Written for nonlawyers, The Copyright Book offers essential information for authors (and creative people in every medium) on the fundamentals of copyright law. The sixth edition has been updated to cover issues that have arisen in the Internet age, including e-reserves, the status of "orphan works," and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
In The Right to Write, journalist and author Julia Cameron discusses the importance of “creative unblocking.” The book offers advice on how to make writing a joyful and cathartic process, as well as examples from her life as a writer.
Award-winning poet Edward Hirsch’s A Poet’s Glossary examines the poetic traditions of the world while providing definitions for important poetic vocabulary, including forms, devices, movements, and rhetorical terms.
Sparked by a speech he gave to a group of college students in upstate New York, writer and illustrator Austin Kleon shares the ten things he wishes some told him when he was young through illustrations, exercises, and examples.
In Odd Type Writers, Celia Blue Johnson explores the quirky writing habits of authors such as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf—who liked to use purple ink and, in her twenties, preferred to write while standing up.
Award-winning novelist John Casey's Beyond the First Draft is a collection of essays that address various topics of concern to fiction writers, including comedy, point of view, structure, and scene-setting. For example, in "Dogma and Anti-Dogma," Casey examines the advice of authors—like J. D. Salinger's "Write for yourself"—and offers ways to interpret their recommendations.
