I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, Wallace Stevens
As with looking at blackbirds, so with writing: there’s no ‘right’ way to write. You want to write well. You probably keep a pile of well-thumbed writing guides by your elbow for those days when the writing genie is on holiday … but you can never have too many books. Below, I’ve selected some books, essays, deliberations, and practical tips filled with insight and experience to inspire and/or provoke you.
Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin; Negotiating with the Dead
John Casey, Beyond the First Draft: The Art of Fiction
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending
Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
Clive James, Poetry Notebook: Reflections on the Intensity of Language
Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know: On Writing
Helen MacDonald, H is for Hawk
Donald Maass, The Fire in Fiction: Passion, Purpose, and Techniques to Make Your Novel Great
Henry Miller, Henry Miller On Writing
Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art
George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’
Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them
Philip Roth, Ghost Writer
Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Jack Smith, Write and Revise for Publication: A 6-month plan for crafting an exceptional novel and other works of fiction
Muriel Spark, Mary Shelley
Elif Shafak, Black Milk: On Motherhood and Writing; The Forty Rules of Love
Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook
Alexander Steele, Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York’s Acclaimed Creative Writing School
Robert Louis Stephenson, Essays in the Art of Writing
Graham Swift, Making an Elephant: Writing from Within
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them
Collections
Always Apprentices: The Believer Presents Twenty-Two Conversations Between Writers, Sheila Heti, Ross Simonini, and Vendela Vida, editors
The Eleventh Draft: Craft and the Writing Life from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, edited by Frank Conroy
