Writing Books I Recommend
These are books worth reading.
A decade ago, a friend, Christopher John Karr, recommended that I read Blake Snyder’s books on screenwriting, starting with the first Save the Cat! book. I read them and wanted more. I realized there were so many books out there with the knowledge, tips, and templates that I was hungry for.
Yes, I’d learned a lot about writing by the time I hit my forties. I had been writing and getting paid for it since I was 22 years old. I’d majored in English and gone to law school and even written quite a few books. But I had so many blind spots, and once Blake Snyder improved my vision, I was ready for more.
Here be more.
The Short Screenplay, Dan Gurskis | My brother read this for a graduate class, and I bought it and enjoyed it. It’s refreshingly nuts and bolts. I find this kind of no-nonsense book on craft satisfying when compared with those books in which the writer-as-teacher hesitates and qualifies and ends up saying nothing. This book gives you writer’s tools and leaves it to you to use them as you see fit. I think this would be very useful for a short-story writer.
The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations, Georges Polti | Originally published in 1917, this encyclopedia of dramatic situations is dry but informative. Use it as a reference work. It’s another one that people mention in passing, and so I just wanted to read it.
Screenplay, Syd Field | I read this just to say I’d read it because so many subsequent screenwriting books refer to it. The first edition was published in 1979. What he left vague others in his wake have clarified.
How to Write a Movie in 21 Days, Viki King | I wish I’d read this when I was a young writer. The first edition came out in 1988. She has a positive tone of voice, which is refreshing. The book is tightly written, short and sweet.
The Tools of Screenwriting, Howard & Mabley | I don’t remember if I got anything new per se out of this book. I know it confirmed for me the many ways of thinking I’d picked up in the books I’d already read. It’s worth reading.
My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, Jeffrey Schechter | It has good alternative views on stories, and it’s written in a positive tone, which I always appreciate.
Steering the Craft, Ursula K. Le Guin | This sets out solid observations on point of view and narrative perspective (limited, involved, detached, etc.) when writing fiction.
The Art of Subtext, Charles Baxter | While it focuses on certain kinds of subtext (it’s a collection of essays on writing fiction, as opposed to a book only about subtext), it reminds you of the importance of subtext on a small scale. It will also make you sensitive to the clunky lack of subtext in most dialogue. I also really like his thoughts on characters needing to “make a scene.”
Notes on the Cinematograph, Robert Bresson | I was more inspired in ten pages of Robert Bresson’s punchy, cryptic observations about how to make movies than in hundreds of pages of the recent writing books I’d read. Keep in mind I read this after reading most of the other books on my lists, and I already had my own system for writing novels worked out. So this was a great book to spark my imagination in new directions.
Between the Scenes, Jeffrey Michael Bays | This book made me aware of scene transitions. As a novelist, I’m now more aware of the many ways to transition between scenes, chapters, and acts to achieve certain effects.
Letters to a Writer of Color, edited by Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro | This is a strong 2023 collection of essays for writers, mainly literary writers. Several writers have endured what appears to have been shitty teaching in creative-writing graduate programs and poor treatment by editors and publishers. Other writers have struggled with acceptance, with being valued, and with marketing expectations that pigeon-holed them. The essays bent my mind in new directions, and the authors offered lists of books to read. For example, I just picked up Lightseekers, a crime novel by Femi Kayode.
Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell?, by William Goldman | He’s a fun writer, direct and idiosyncratic, and while I enjoy his books on writing, I find any strategy he espouses hard to reproduce in my own process. I guess it’s another way of saying he’s not a teacher or even trying to be; he’s just telling you how it was for him as a screenwriter in Hollywood. And it’s fun to read about that.
On Writing, Stephen King | I read this a long time ago, and it’s a famous one, yes. What sticks with me, to this day, is the impression I have of his down-to-earth attitude toward writing. Get your butt in the chair and write every day. Read every day. Learn from everyone. Pay attention to other people. Listen. Take notes. Go to scary places. Go to happy places. Go where you want. Respect your readers. Don’t be a jerk.
This Year You Write Your Novel (2007) and Elements of Fiction (2019), Walter Mosely | I enjoyed these slim books because I’m always curious what successful and prolific novelists have to say. I don’t think anything much stuck with me, but perhaps because I’d already read a hundred other books on writing by the time I read these. I am always on the lookout for new tools to drop into my bag of tricks, and I think you will find that what seems new to you depends very much on the order in which you read books like these.
Bird by Bird, Ann Lamott | I can’t say she shares any particular writing tips or tools or strategies, but I was won over by her sense of humor. This is a writer’s memoir to be enjoyed.
Making a Literary Life, Carolyn See | The version of the book I read was beset by a terribly fussy cover totally out of sync with her vibrant personality. She’s funny, smart, tough, and down to earth. I have not read any of her books yet, but I will. She passed away in 2016.
The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers | I first heard of this book when I was reading another book, From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun, which I recommend. Barzun wrote his own book on writing, Simple & Direct, which I have also read—it took me a long time to get through it, like, years—and only recommend if you want a deep dive into writing mechanics. But in Dawn, Barzun did this cool thing in the margins of this giant tome on western civilization: he’d write, “The book to read is,” and then he’d name the book he was recommending, which could be about anything from Duchamp to Zola. I made a list of the books Barzun was recommending, and I read them. This is how I learned about the works of La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Agate, Liszt, DeBussy, and so on, including Dorothy Sayers, a writer with a highly developed sensibility that is so very, very different from mine. She combines a searching creativity with a particular Christianity, and she writes her critiques in the declarative voice of the royal “we,” which I miss sometimes today when most writers hedge their thinking with self-deprecating qualifiers.
How Poems Get Made, by James Longenbach | This is a great book, which I originally read in my teaching capacity, hunting for ways to inspire students to write poems. I enjoy the break from thinking intently about novels by dipping into other forms of writing, like poetry. I imagine poets do the same, in reverse.
The Art of Is, by Stephen Nachmanovitch | I recommend this book on life, creativity, and improvisation. It’s a lovely book that invites you to allow your artistic impulses to express themselves in a variety of ways in your life.
The Hero, by Lee Child | This is a cute little matchbook of a book, so why not read it? That was my thought when I saw the book at the library. I haven’t read a Lee Child novel, but I do like the new Reacher series on Amazon. I expected some insight into writing an action hero, but you won’t find any writing tips here. You will learn about Child’s perspective on one kind of hero, the institutional man who breaks the rules for the greater good of society, an ends-justify-the-means type of guy who needs the moral cover before nailing bad guys who threaten the existing order. Keep in mind this is only one kind of hero. (This kind of hero gives you a hint at how to write a villain: a villain is someone who doesn’t need the moral cover to indulge their impulse to act violently.)
Before and After the Book Deal, by Courtney Maum | This 2020 book is well worth the read to gain insight into today’s world of publishing. Will you get an agent, a manager, or a book deal just by reading this book? Wouldn’t that be nice? Yes, well, forewarned is forearmed, and this book gets you ready for the real world, however much you don’t want to tweet, post, like, follow, comment, blog, selfie, video, podcast, and market yourself. Deep sigh. Keep writing.
I continue to read books on writing, and if they’re bad, unstructured, pretentious, vague, a brain dump, or mostly memoir, I still finish reading them even if I don’t learn anything from them because, well, I don’t know I won’t learn anything until I read all the way to the end.
And that’ll happen to you (that you may not get anything out of a book on writing) the more books you read and the more you create your own process. The more tools you gather, in other words, the more you’ll see those same tools repeated in other books and won’t need to gather them. You’ll already have them.
But there might be that one concept you didn’t know about, and it might be the only one of use to you in the entire 250-page book. But it’ll be worth it to you to have found it.
And while that might seem a rather narrow, gimme-gimme reason to read books on writing, I also read to enjoy another writer’s personality and to feel part of a community. Writing can be a solitary activity, and unless you’re part of a writers’ room or a writing partnership or a writers’ group, you may find reading writers’ books, guides, and memoirs to be a way to participate, imaginatively, in a larger community of like-minded folks, living or dead, from around the world.
Be open to any book on writing by any type of writer from any walk of life.
You can’t write well if you aren’t a humanist, and you can’t teach if you aren’t also a student.
So I’m always reading.
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PHOTO: Just a few of my books on writing
