Living Write: The Secret to Inviting Your Craft Into Your Daily Life
Stone explores practical, day-to-day techniques and psychological exercises designed to enable and encourage writers to write more effectively and prolifically.
Best Books for Writers
From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.
The Writing Warrior: Discovering the Courage to Free Your True Voice
Herring, author of Writing Begins with the Breath, discusses exercises designed to foster greater spontaneity and freedom in one’s writing.
The Novelist’s Lexicon: Writers On the Words That Define Their Work
Renowned contemporary authors—including Rick Moody, Etgar Keret, Colum McCann, and Annie Proulx— select and write about a specific word that is meaningful to them. Their essays reveal to the reader the author’s inner-thoughts and quirky musings.
Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
In this resource for writers, Silverman focuses on honing one’s personal story and voice in order to write a truthful, captivating memoir. Silverman also explores effective ways of marketing and publishing one’s “confessional,” as well.
Poetry In Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversation With America’s Poets
The author compiles interviews between Pearl London (daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster) and prominent poets including Derek Walcott, Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, Louise Gluck, and Charles Simic. The poets gave writing seminars to students at the New School from from 1973 to 1996.
The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing and Life
The author of The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning, and Sexual Power of Red Hair provides straight-forward tactics and advice for writing honest memoirs.
Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction
The author provides practical ideas and techniques for writing truthful, absorbing, and factual memoirs. This guidebook is broken down into handy sections such as “Family Members as Characters,” “Fact-Checking,” “Reconstruction of Events,” and “Writer’s Responsibilities to Subjects.”
Novel Ideas: Contemporary Authors Share the Creative Process
Shoup and Denman explore how to write a novel and focus on the elements of fiction and the process of revision. The authors also interview successful novelists in order to provide readers with further insight into crafting their own stories.
Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry
O’Driscoll collects hundreds of inspirational and thought-provoking quotations about poetry, spanning topics such as “Poetry in Motion,” “Poetic Drive,” and “Call Yourself a Poet,” from prominent authors.
Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing
The author of Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose (Broadway Books, 1999) explores syntax, grammar, and powerful ways of utilizing verbs to write more compelling, effecive prose.
Passwords Primeval: 20 American Poets in Their Own Words
The author interviews successful poets about their work and focuses on prevalent themes, images, and their process of revision.
642 Things to Write About: A Journal
Get your creative juices flowing with this collection of witty, outrageous, and thought-provoking writing prompts compiled by thirty-five members of the San Francisco Writers' Grotto, a workspace for professional writers.
An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery
The author uses stories of artists' lives, personal anecdotes, and insights from the author's work as a psychotherapist to examine the psychological obstacles that prevent people, including poets and writers, from staying with, and relishing, the process of art-making.
The Weekend Novelist Rewrites the Novel: A Step-by-Step Guide to Perfecting Your Work
The author of The Weekend Novelist guides readers through a series of seventeen weekend revision exercises.
Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories
The author, a widely published poet and the executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey, combines her own personal story as a writer with suggestions for writers at all stages of development.
In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction
This collection of work previously published in the literary journal that helped define a genre includes writing by Diane Ackerman, Phillip Lopate, John McPhee, Richard Rodriguez, Floyd Skloot, John Edgar Wideman, and Terry Tempest Williams.
The Art of Styling Sentences
The new edition of this reference book for students, writers, and educators reviews the fundamentals of correct sentence structure, then presents twenty basic sentence patterns that encompass virtually every effective way in which simple, compound, and complex sentences can be structured.
Building Fiction: How to Develop Plot and Structure
In this resource for fiction writers, short story and novelist Jesse Lee Kercheval equates structuring fiction with building a house. Kercheval offers advice on generating story ideas, developing characters, and revision. Each chapter is accompanied by writing exercises as well.
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
By presenting the habits and routines of various artists—including writers such as Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, Jane Austen, Ann Beattie, Simone de Beauvoir, Patricia Highsmith, Arthur Miller, Gertrude Stein, Philip Roth, and Voltaire—Mason Currey aims to show, as he writes in his introduction, "how grand creative visions translate to small daily increments; how one's working habits influence the work itself, and vice versa."
After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography
In this collection of twenty-eight essays, poets such as Frank Bidart, Marilyn Chin, Billy Collins, Louise Glück, Kimiko Hahn, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Sharon Olds explore the autobiographical impulse in poetry. As Library Journal writes: "Each weighs in on a different area of the discussion, but all are evocative and engaging. One quickly discovers that the confessional poem's legacy extends further than the expected Plath, Sexton, and Lowell. Sappho, Shakespeare's elusive figures, Milton's daughters, and Mary Wordsworth are as likely to be evoked by these writers, as they demonstrate how poetic voice spans an infinite variety of combinations."
One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft
In this guide writer and teacher Susan M. Tiberghien provides advice and writing exercises that help beginning writers develop their voice and enrich their craft.
The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life With Language
Author of the classic Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg offers another writing guide based on her forty years of teaching small, intensive workshops at a remote center in the rural Southwest. In chapters with titles such as "Why Silence?," "Meditation (Sitting)," "Seven Attitudes of Mindfulness," and "Six-Word Memoir," Goldberg shares her insights about finding truth and clarity on the way to establishing a literary life.
The Virtues of Poetry
Written by poet and critic James Logenbach, this collection of twelve essays explores various ways that poetry at its most successful delivers meaning. Longenbach uses as examples poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Bishop, and Ashbery, among other greats.
The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders
An anthology of essays by poets such as Kazim Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, Naomi Shihab Nye, Nick Flynn, Yusef Komunyakaa, Claudia Rankine, and Alissa Valles whose travels have informed their writing. The book also includes practical resources for finding work abroad, applying for fellowships and residencies, funding a trip, obtaining proper travel documents, and attending to other cultural considerations.
Vivid and Continuous: Essays and Exercises for Writing Fiction
In Vivid and Continuousseasoned fiction writer and teacher John McNally, who is also the author of The Creative Writer’s Survival Guide, offers solutions to the problems beginning fiction writers face. Each of the fifteen chapters includes writing exercises meant to reinforce McNally’s guidance.
