Are you a writer? Do you like to learn about the creative process, either for your own projects or just because you think it’s interesting? This post is about to brighten your day. As I’m sure you know, there’s a booming industry of books on the art and craft of writing, from all sorts of different authors, covering all sorts of different angles. I’ve collected 18 of my favorites.
Let me start with a tip: all the books on this list are very good and useful, and if you’re a writer, I think you should read them! but: what makes a writer is to create a space, as often as possible, to think and write. and that can mean many things! it could mean writing on a note app during your baby’s nap, it could mean an hour before work every day, it could mean sitting under a tree with a moleskine and a fancy pen, it could mean a long writing session at week or dictate during your commute, or stay up until 4 a.m. m. writing fic.
You are reading: Books on the craft of writing
also read as much as possible, in as many genres as possible, and to that end, here’s a list of books!
never say you can’t survive by charlie jane anders
charlie jane anders has been giving us all awesome writing tips for years. (I wrote a post about it in 2014!) In the wake of the 2016 election, you found yourself thinking even more than usual about the ways stories can help us cope with grief and how the act of writing itself can become a structure for a person who feels that his life, or his country, is in danger of collapsing. her thoughts resulted in a fantastic series of essays, which slowly turned into a book of writing, advice, and a bit of memoir. some of those essays have been published here on tordot (in a series also titled “never say you can’t survive”) and now the full book will be available in august!
A common thread running through the book is the idea that by building your own worlds, you can better help yourself deal with the problems in this world we all share. anders is especially dedicated to the importance of escapism:
and escapism is resistance. people sometimes talk about escapist storytelling as a kind of dereliction of duty, like we’re just running away from the fight. that’s bullshit right there. In her 1979 collection of essays The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien thus: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, do we not consider it his duty to escape from him? …. if we value freedom of mind and soul, if we are supporters of freedom, then it is our duty to escape and take as many people as we can.”
It talks about practical things, like world building and plot, but also delves into the emotional side of writing, looking at impostor syndrome, how to use anger, how to protect your own personal weirdness, and how to channel your beliefs. politics in your work without being too pedantic. This is a great book for anyone working on their writing, but it’s a particular gold mine for those working on science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
wonderful book by jeff vandermeer
Of all the books on this list, Jeff Vandermeer’s Book of Wonders is the most comprehensive. the exercises in the book are all about short-circuiting your habitual patterns of thought and opening you up to the idea that, in reality, a story can be anything and can go anywhere. Instead of simply relying on snippets of text and direct writing advice, Vandermeer uses illustrations, asides, sidebars, and a full interactive site to create a conversation with his reader. he also includes a number of essays by other writers, often writers who disagree with the advice he has just given, to create a polyphonic craft book. this serves a purpose that I think is rare even in the most well-intentioned writing advice: it reminds you that writing, and all art (and, heck, life) is a flux. there are no set answers. your book (or painting, or symphony) is your art. it can be whatever you want. and the craft discussion around that isn’t a top-down conference, it’s a conversation, an argument, and occasionally a fantastical fish-beast with a city on its back.
on writing: a memoir of stephen king’s craft
This is a classic for a reason! Stephen King started writing about writing in 1997, but put it aside for a while and debated ending it. he returned to the project and finished a draft in early 1999. then in june 1999 he was hit by a pickup truck and nearly killed while hiking. after months of surgeries and physical therapy, he wasn’t sure if he would write again and found it almost impossible to start new projects. writing was the only job he could return to: adding a new section on the accident and making the book more of a memoir than a craft book. while he was writing, he discovered that a new subject awaited him: what really mattered to him now was to talk about why he wrote. and why he thinks other people should write. This book has great practical advice and the grim “keep your butt in the chair” energy you want in a writing book, but it’s also a powerful reminder of why storytelling is vital to human life.
on writing is organized into “c.v.”, “what is writing”, “toolbox”, “on writing” and “on life: a postscript”—”c.v.” It’s a mini-memoir that focuses on how his writing and life intertwine, the sections in between being the procedural sections (drawing examples from everyone from Truman Capote to Johns Steinbeck and Grisham to Mary Karr, H.P. Lovecraft and Charles Dickens). ), and the last is his account of the truck accident that nearly killed him.
We’re in King Country here, so it opens with three forwards, including one in which he tells you how he came to be in a songwriter band called The Rock Bottom Rests, which in turn led to the conversation with Amy. tan that inspired writing. They talked about how the people in the author’s Q&A are always asking delinquents, updikes, and styrons about his craft, but those kinds of questions never come up with popular novelists. This is an important note: King wrote this book explicitly for people who want to write a strong and popular work. horror, sci-fi, romance: I think most people now understand that those are all valid genres, but when King was writing this book in the late ’90s, the literary world was very much a snobs vs. slobs arena. (what do i think makes michael chabon… bill murray?) but the heart of the book can be summed up with the reminder that king gives you at the end of the “c.v.” section: “…put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit there to write, remember why it’s not in the middle of the room. life is not a support system for art. it’s the other way around.”
on the writing of samuel r. delany
Of all the writers on this list, Delany probably has the most breadth. he’s written space opera, high fantasy, poetry, short stories, fables, an epoch-defining counterculture work, memoir, pornography, critical essays, comics, you name it, he’s got it in a book or a drawer somewhere. About Writing is a fairly high-end craft book. although he does give advice, especially in an appendix subtitled “nits, pinches, tucks and tips”, he is more interested in delving into story structure, talking about how to shape paragraphs, and wrestling with other writers’ work. he’s also very clear on a daunting concept, and that daunting concept is in german, so you know he means business. if you think you want to write, you better make sure you have begeisterung, the spirit of inspiration and determination that drives a person to create in the face of a vast and unknowable universe.
so check and make sure you have some of that, and then get out your pen.
meander spiral explode by jane alison
Spiral Meander Explode might be the most useful craft book I’ve ever read. its author, jane alison, has worked as an editor, has written five novels, a memoir, and a book on the poetry of ovid (one of her novels, the artist of love, is also about ovid and a possibly magical woman with the found) and has taught in various capacities for decades, the resume of an excellent writer, but what makes it so good is that it rejects much of the standard work of a craft book. there are no caveats about writing every day, or staying in the chair a certain amount of time, or arguing about whether mine is useful or not. Instead, Alison talks about the shape. Most of us were probably taught things about escalating action, conflict, and denouement (a word I still pronounce “duh-noo-mint” today), but Alison points out that there’s no law that says a story has to be shaped into a triangle:
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The arch is an elegant shape, especially when translated into its natural form, a wave. its rise and fall traces a movement that we perceive in the heartbeat, breaking swell, sun, and there is real power in the movement of a wave from start to midpoint to finish. but something that swells and tightens to climax, then collapses: a bit masculo-sexual, no? why is this the form we should expect our stories to take?
You can read some of his thoughts in this paris review essay, but the book goes much further by imagining different shapes and patterns a story can take, often drawing on nature. spirals, capillaries, nautilus shells, spiky cacti, ocean waves – it’s a great reminder that a story can be anything, something I think is especially helpful for those of us who write sffh.
creating damon knight short fiction
damon knight is a giant from sff. wrote “to serve man”, was a member of the futurians, founded the science fiction and fantasy writers of america and co-founded bugler writers workshop, popularized the term “idiot plot”, became a grandmaster in 1994 and He won a Hugo for his review when they used to give out critics’ awards. (eg)
In the early ’80s, he wrote one of the all-time classic writing advice books: Creating Short Fiction, which was updated and expanded several times. Why is it an all time classic? Breaks the daunting task of writing a story into small, achievable goals with exercises for learning to see, learning to remember, building conflict, asking characters questions, and choosing which point of view will work best for you. and in addition to those very practical steps, he also touches on more nebulous issues, such as in a chapter titled “what to do when you’re stuck.” Plus, he devotes an entire section to life as a working writer, with advice on developing strong work habits, dealing with despair and rejection, networking, and deciding if drugs can help.
zen in the art of writing by ray bradbury
if you want to get a taste of bradbury’s craft essay book, in the preface ask, “what does writing teach us?”
first of all, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. we must earn our living once it has been given to us. life asks for rewards because it has favored us with animation.
so even though our art cannot save us from wars, deprivation, envy, greed, old age or death, as we wish, it can revitalize us in the midst of it all.
secondly, writing is surviving. any art, any good work, of course, is that.
A few paragraphs later, he advises: “you should stay drunk writing so that reality doesn’t destroy you”. all this is to warn you what awaits you with this book. this is my favorite kind of craft book, where the author grabs you by a couple of imaginary flaps and lifts you off the ground and reminds you that writing is joyous and exuberant, even if he doesn’t always feel that way. you are creating something where there was nothing, and that is not something to be taken lightly. And sure, Bradbury walks you through his early days of keeping lists that later became classic stories, gives brief retellings of the writing of classics like Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles, and provides some great practical advice. but he also gives titles to essays like “how to keep and feed a muse”, and he reminds you that writers are fucking magicians.
and we are.
playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination of toni morrison
playing in the dark grew out of a series of lectures that toni morrison (the author of the great american horror novel that might as well be the great american novel) gave at harvard, and it does what it says on the tin: morrison does it guide through the work of mark twain, ernest hemingway, willa cather, and especially edgar allan poe (“no early american writer is more important to the concept of african-americanism than poe”) to look at the way white writers use “blackness” as a concept, and black bodies as objects, to define whiteness in his narration.
This is not a craft book, but anyone serious about writing should read it.
swimming in a pond in the rain by george saunders
george saunders is one of our best short story writers, full stop, but he’s especially appreciated for his ability to jump between extreme realism and genre-defying stories of zombies, ghosts, and near-future theme parks that fail. He’s also a renowned professor of writing, who has been teaching at Syracuse University’s MFA program since 1997. In his first craft book, he took lessons and anecdotes from his popular Syracuse course on the Russian short story and distributed them across nine chapters covering seven classic tales. the book reproduces the stories in their entirety, with each chapter taking you through them in different ways. For Anton Chekhov’s “On The Wagon,” he reads one page at a time, with Saunders’s commentary dividing the story to discuss structure and tension as it progresses. With Ivan Turgenev’s “The Singers,” he reads the entire piece and then gets an essay on Turgenev’s life, the historical context, and how that shaped his writing. The book is great, and you can listen to an interview with Saunders about his hopes for the book here. and heck, you have his recent interview with seth meyers, where he talks about history as memory :
crafting in the real world: rethinking fiction writing and workshops by matthew salesses
Do you know how it has become popular to talk about decolonizing your bookshelf? That’s a great thing for readers to think about, but Saless’s book is about decolonizing at the source: first, in your own writing, and then in the workshops you attend and/or lead. salesses is the author of the hundred year flood and disappearing doppelgänger disappearing and teaches at coe university. With his first book of handmade essays, he gives specific advice on how to combat racism in the workshop, and also how to write from your culture without focusing on white readers, male readers, heterosexual readers, etc. works through excerpts from classics like A Wizard From Earthsea and The Arabian Nights, and includes sections on how teachers can rethink their syllabi and grading systems to be more inclusive, and how writers, especially those who start, they can make sure they tell the stories they want to tell. not the ones who think they should count. He also points out that many MFA shows, founded and run by white, middle-class writers, center a particular kind of American linear storytelling. To illustrate this, he spends a chapter guiding readers through the differences between Chinese and Western storytelling, which you can read here!
kate wilhelm narrator
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A very different beast than damon knight’s how-to guide, storyteller is more of a memory/craft hybrid which I particularly love. In this case, the memoir portion tells the story of the founding and growth of Clarín’s writers’ workshop, and recounts approximately thirty years of stories from the SFF community. That alone would make for great reading, but Wilhelm intersperses the memories and anecdotes with his own thoughts on the art of writing. Of course, there is a reason why Clarion is a legendary workshop, and that reason shows: for all the guidance a new writer receives, instructors are also willing to criticize and expect their students to put in the effort to become truly professional writers. and this book also describes the need to leave any treasure at the door when it’s time to work on a story or listen to an editor.
how to write an autobiographical novel by alexander chee
This is not an instruction book! but I’m including it on this list because it has great practical advice along with personal essays. Just like About Writing, this collection of linked essays is as much a memoir as it is a book about writing, but that’s the point: In almost every essay, Chee talks about how his “life” and his “life as a writer” they are inextricable. it also shows how wide a life as a writer can be: from x-men fanfic to historical novels, “crappy first autobiographical novels” (spoiler alert: his first novel is absurdly ridiculously good), short stories, and gardening magazines. , All of them. the writing expresses different parts of his personality. and, again as king, chee is too willing to talk about money. He tracks many of the jobs he needed to get by, the horrible intersection of pain and freedom he felt in the wake of an inheritance, his constant negotiations of class and race while dealing with the New York publishing world. /p>
On a more personal note, I’ve been lucky enough to take a couple of classes with chee, and they’ve been a great help to my own process. Given that, I’m sharing this lecture/read he gave at brown which is full of great advice:
this year you write your walter mosley novel
Now let’s look at another angle of He Bradbury’s approach: While Mosley also emphasizes the importance of letting your subconscious roam free in your writing, he is much more focused on the practical side of the work. He’ll walk you through exactly what the title promises, giving you tips and exercises to write a novel project in a year. he crunches the numbers for you and reminds you that if you can write 600 to 1,200 words every day, you’ll have 60,000 words in three months, that’s a short novel but he also stresses that the most important thing about writing is rewriting, so did not title the book this summer you complete and fully publish your novella. he recommends at least 90 minutes a day, and plenty of editing and rewriting to polish that initial 60,000-word block into a book you could publish. And even there, Mosley is willing to tell his own stories of rejection, even after dozens of books! and the creation of an all time classic gumshoe! and a film adaptation with denzel washington!—to remind you that the work is never really done.
writing to the other: a practical approach by nisi shawl and cynthia ward
Like several of the other books on this list, writing the other grew out of a bugle workshop. In 1992, a student in Nisi Shawl’s class debated whether it was ever okay for a writer to create characters with backgrounds different from his own. The consensus seemed to be that it wasn’t a good idea, as the results can be hurtful and offensive, but Shawl saw potential in tackling the question more directly. Along with fellow Seattle sci-fi writer Cynthia Ward, Shawl created a workshop to address precisely these issues, and that ultimately gave rise to this manual, which guides writers through exercises and writing prompts to help them write. across differences without creating caricatures or stereotypes. you can read an excerpt here!
should be writing: a mur lafferty writers workshop
mur lafferty’s campbell award-winning craft book began life as a podcast, also titled i should be writing. the podcast served both to help her talk about her own fears of writing failure and to encourage others and create a community of people who wanted to write, but often felt that becoming a writer was an impossible goal. as she says in her book’s intro:
I started recording my hopes, fears, dreams, and setbacks, giving people an honest look at the life of a beginning writer, someone who could easily get discouraged but wasn’t going to give up. I didn’t focus so much on the craft, because he was a novice there. but he did know about the brain weasels (or bullies, which we’ll talk about later in this book) that eat away at a writer, and how those weasels lie.
A few years later, he started a follow-up podcast called ditch diggers, an honest look at the process of becoming an active and published writer, and some of the podcast material is also mentioned on isbw. In addition to tips for defeating bullies, or at least how to deal with them, Lafferty’s book features a resource section and an exercises and tips section, and an update on Ray Bradbury’s essay “Caring for and Feeding Your Child.” Author,” which tackles the widespread myth that authors produce their best work through a mist of broken relationships and alcohol-induced depression.
directing the craft and language of the night and conversations about writing by ursula k le guin
you’re absolutely right, ursula has three books. conducting the craft is the more “hands-on” of the two, a clear and beautifully written guide that attempts to teach writers how to become comfortable enough with the tools of English to be able to play with them. Across ten chapters, Le Guin uses examples from classic literature to break down forms and techniques of writing, emphasizing that the purpose of language is to tell the story (not brag), and using exercises to help writers experiment with words. . the language of the night, on the other hand, is a variety of essays, some on the state of the sff and others on the craft. it was first published in 1979 and then updated in 1992, so obviously some of the reviews are a bit out of date.
if you deny any affinity with any other person or class of person, if you declare that you are entirely different from yourself, as men have made women, and class has made class, and nation has made mankind nation, you can hate it or deify it; but in any case you have denied their spiritual equality and their human reality. you have turned it into a thing, with which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. and so you have fatally impoverished your own reality.
Indeed, you have alienated yourself.
shit. that’s from “american sf and the other”, first published in 1975, maybe not as outdated as i’d hoped. other essays in the book map the commodification of fantasy as a genre (“from elfland to poughkeepsie”), delve into tolkien (“the shadow and the boy”), and deconstruct his own current relationship to gender in his work ( “is it gender is it necessary?”) and all are useful for anyone who wants to write sffh. finally, conversations on writing is a book of extensive conversations with writer and broadcaster david naimon, in which le guin talks about his career , writing techniques, and of course his thoughts on the genre.The conversations were collected into a book in 2018.
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These are 18 of the best craft books I’ve ever read. I hope you find these books as useful as I do!
Originally published May 2021.
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