Best Books for Writers

In this anthology, award-winning poet Robert Pinsky demonstrates how one learns to write poetry by first learning to read it. Divided into four sections—Freedom, Listening, Form, and Dreaming Things Up—Pinsky presents his mentors’ work to encourage the reader to take a practical approach, with informed pleasure and sharp interest in the craft. Included are exemplary works from poets such as Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. “A guide like this book aims to make useful hints and suggestions for the journey,” writes Pinsky in the preface. “For me, this anthology will succeed if it encourages the reader to emulate it by replacing it, or supplementing it.”  

The thirty-two essays included in this collection were published in the magazine, Creative Nonfiction, which debuted in 1994 when the literary genre was still met with skepticism. The magazine helped writers explore the personal essay and bring the genre recognition with its contributors pioneering what would come to be known as the “fourth genre.” This anthology includes contributors from the magazine’s seventy-eight issues, award-winning and contemporary authors such as Brian Boome, Carolyn Forche, Elizabeth Fortescue, Anne McGrath, John McPhee, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rodriguez, Charles Simic, and John Edgar Wideman. “Creative nonfiction was, in many ways, a release,” writes Creative Nonfiction’s founder and editor Lee Gutkind in the introduction. “It allowed and encouraged writers of poetry and fiction to cross genres, reach for new ideas, and find fresh ways of expression.” 

The author of two dozen suspense novels leads readers through her writing process, revealing the steps she took to start and finish her 2008 novel, Careless in Red, from conceiving the characters and developing the voice to outlining the plot and building the scenes. In Mastering the Process, George returns to the form she established in her 2004 book, Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, in which she illustrates her points using exemplary works by E. M. Forster, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Hoffman, John Irving, Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, Harper Lee, and Toni Morrison. This time she sticks to one consistent model—the book she wrote herself using a process she has followed for many of her novels. The result is a behind-the-scenes look at a bestselling author’s decisions as they are made throughout the creative process. 

In this guidebook on creative research and how to use it to lend authenticity to works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, author and professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington speaks to the hard work and thrill of research. Helpful chapters guide writers through the steps of preparing a research plan, fact-checking, interviewing subjects, and using “memory, imagination, and personal expertise.” Gerard demystifies the research process with approachable steps to shine a light on the art which often unearths surprises and fuels imagination. “Research can take you to that golden intersection where the personal meets the public, the private crosses the universal, where the best literature lives,” writes Gerard. “It is deeply rooted in the writer’s heart, yet blossoms out into a larger thing that includes the world.”   

“Instinct alone isn’t enough. To produce a work of art, technique must also be brought to bear. When instinct and technique merge seamlessly, I call the result cunning,” writes Peter Selgin, author and professor at Georgia College & State University, in this craft book “for serious writers of all levels.” The comprehensive guide includes practical advice and exemplary passages that cover essential elements of the writing process from inspiration and ideas, to point of view and dialogue, to structure and revision.  

In this intergenerational collection, contemporary poets of multiple languages and lands illuminate the meaning of the Asian American and Pacific Islander identity. Contributors to this anthology divided into five sections—“Talk Story,” “Mourn,” “Pronounce,” “Fight,” and “Love”—include Marilyn Chin, Sarah Gambito, Sarah Kay, Ed Bok Lee, David Mura, Joshua Nguyen, Patrick Rosal, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Shelley Wong. “Gathered from a range of contemporary schools and movements, these poems move, push, pulse,” write the editors in the introduction. “They are alive: gathered heat, heat gathering, and gathered into a motely but—we must insist—beautiful We.” 

“Memory is rarely whole or factually correct.... What we remember is a reconstruction of image and feeling that suits our needs and purposes.” Author and psychotherapist Maureen Murdock begins this two-part book by exploring the mutability of memory and its powerful connection to identity, drawing upon her own experiences with a mother struggling with Alzheimer’s disease and examining works of memoir by authors, such as Isabel Allende, J. M. Coetzee, and Mary Karr. The second part of the book acts as a primer guiding writers through the practical elements of craft with writing exercises and chapters including “Getting Started,” “Universality,” and “Emotional Truth and the Voice of the Narrator.”  

This handbook is an engaging primer on the art of writing flash fiction. David Galef covers the origins, evolution, and subcategories of the form that include vignettes, prose poems, character sketches, fables, lists, twist stories, surrealism, and metafiction. Each chapter is full of practical tips, techniques, and editing strategies specific to flash fiction, as well as inspiring prompts and exemplary stories by authors, such as Donald Barthelme, Colette, Roxane Gay, Yusef Komunyakaa, Bharati Mukherjee, Sei Shōnagon, Alice Walker, and John Edgar Wideman. “Writing so that every word counts makes for powerful, memorable work,” writes Galef.  

From explorations of St. Teresa of Avila and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to George Sand, W. E. B. Du Bois, Virginia Woolf, and Frank McCourt, author and scholar Jill Ker Conway writes an in-depth investigation of memoir writing, tracing its evolution and shedding light on how autobiographical storytelling reflects cultural context and is shaped by social forces, such as gender roles. “Can anyone be both subject and object of the same sentences—the speaker and the subject spoken about?” asks Conway. Throughout the chapters in this book, Conway presents memoir as a powerful form that fosters understanding—illuminating perceptions of the past and providing instructions and insights for the future.   

Drawing inspiration from the principles of method acting, John Dufresne’s The Lie That Tells a Truth demystifies the writing process and covers the basics of the craft, including how to invent characters, develop a voice, and revise work. Through literary analysis of the works of Anton Chekhov, Frank O’Connor, Eudora Welty, and others, as well as sets of writing exercises for each chapter, Dufresne creates a practical and comprehensive guide with steps on how to become a confident storyteller. As Dufresne writes in the introduction, “No one else can or will give you permission to write, so don’t even ask.” 

In this collection of essays, the former director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the coeditor of the journal Agni reflects on “the old questions, the good questions, the old Heideggerian questions that seem so very basic on the surface, but then you get caught in the implications and realize that they go on and on and that you’ll only go crazy trying to answer them.” Chief among Birkerts’s interrogations is what it means to be a writer today, when so many other mediums compete for an audience. Meditating on smartphones, photography, Jorge Luis Borges, Bob Dylan, and more, Birkerts offers writing— “the right words in the right order”—as a pathway through an increasingly complex labyrinth.