Best Books for Writers

In The Language of Fiction, novelist and English professor Brian Shawver provides a guide through language fundamentals—from style to sentence structure to punctuation and the most common errors—demonstrating that careful attention to the mechanics of prose can have a profound effect on the reader’s experience. This humorous and accessible book will inspire writers to reevaluate their own choices with renewed vigor, resulting in more intentional and powerful storytelling.

“Nobody rereads Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’ to be reminded that in September leaves turn colors and fall from the trees; even if we know the poem by heart, we savor our experience of the poem’s language as it unfolds in time, luring us forward.” In How Poems Get Made, James Longenbach offers a practical guide to writing poetry, providing examples from a range of poets—Blake, Crane, Donne, Dickinson, Moore, Shakespeare—while also dissecting the elements that bring readers back to the same poems over and over again. Each chapter examines an element or quality, such as diction, syntax, figures, and rhythms, showing in detail how a poem gets made.

“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.

In this 2002 edition with a new introduction, California poet laureate Dana Gioia explores a range of topics on poetry’s evolving roles through his collection of essays, and considers integral craft elements with a focus on modernist poets such as Elizabeth Bishop and Robinson Jeffers. Written in lively and straightforward prose, Gioia’s insights on poetry’s marginalization, free verse versus formalism, and the merits of long narrative poetry will inspire writers to reevaluate their form and style, and examine how their work fits into contemporary society.

In her first book preceding Story Genius, Lisa Cron offers a practical guide to understanding the human brain’s predisposition toward compelling narratives and how to transform this knowledge into powerful storytelling techniques. With titles such as “I’ll Feel What He’s Feeling,” “Digging Up Your Protagonist’s Inner Issue,” and “The Road From Setup to Payoff,” each of the twelve chapters zeroes in on a cognitive secret and its correlating story secret, and includes illustrative examples and checklists so that writers can apply Cron’s tips to their own work. 

​In this collection of nine essays, ​Debra Spark delves into the elements of craft that make for effective and resonant storytelling, sharing personal anecdotes and humorous observations along the way. Spark brings critical insights and engaging candor to key issues integral to fiction writing such as emotion, style and voice, the origins of creative inspiration, beginnings and endings, and relevance to contemporary world issues.

The inaugural title in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry is actually a pair of books, packaged as one, that includes talks on poetry delivered in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and other cities across the United States in 2014. In The Lives of the Poems, Joshua Beckman, an editor at Wave, offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books. A unique presentation of personal, intellectually curious, and provocative talks, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks provides rare insights into a deeply literary life.

“Life might be hard, but art? This we can do. Together.” Francesca Lia Block’s The Thorn Necklace is a prescriptive memoir examining the interrelationship between life’s challenges and artistic practice, and the transformative potential of creative writing as a healing process. Block shares lively anecdotes from her personal life and from exemplary literature, and provides numerous exercises on narrative development for writers of both prose and poetry seeking to channel their own creative energy and experiences into powerful storytelling.