Preface →
How does one truly begin to learn the craft of writing? That is a difficult question, and not one that anyone has actually asked me, so I won’t answer it. I do think it’s instructive to at least gesture at the books I consider of significant importance, though.
This page is backdated to the day I had a chatroom conversation, where I listed out most of these titles. I think it’s worth preserving chiefly because, several years ago, I was far more interested in reading books of writing advice than I am now, and my fluency with the landscape as degraded greatly. (I doubt I could easily remember many of these titles without this list to remind me.)
I will amend this with some newer addition. If you are an absolute beginner, one of the best and most accessible resources on the basics is this Writing Guide. Read it and keep it bookmarked.
Of similar prevance, I would be remiss not to mention the bloggings of AlicornPriest, a deep influence on my teenage self learning to write. Their blog is no longer properly indexed, but this Google Doc compiles editted versions of their posts on writing.
Lastly, I should mention Several Short Sentences About Writing, one of the first books of the sort I’ve read in years, and what a read! I think it’s easily the best demonstration of why prose is worth caring about, and it gracefully introduces a tremendous quantity of insight. Best of all, it achieves all of this in a volume slim enough you could read it in an afternoon. Check it out!
With all that said, here is the lightly-editted list I had presented back in 2020.
← Book List →
Essentials
- Wonderbook by Jeff VanderMeer and others: 10/10, amazingly insightful for philosophy, and many fresh points across the spectrum craftwise, huge variety of authors contributing.
- Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver: 9/10, I consider this the go-to book for writing better scenes.
- Word Painting by Rebecca McClanahan: 8/10, great instruction for writing descriptions.
Recommended
5k Words Per Hour by Chris Fox, and 2k to 10k by Rachel Aaron: Good for improving output quantity. These sound gimmicky and like it’ll lead to writing vomit, but it’s actually a great way to improve quickly. Plus, these are really short reads.
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: Nominative determinism! Anyway, this is a great one. Lots of examples, and it focuses on how great writes pick their words, sentences, paragraphs. Lovely book.
The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsynth. Anthoer great one, quite compellingly written. Dude has a boner for Shakesphere, but he knows what he’s talking about. It’s also preoccupied with zany greek names for rhetorical techniques, but what it has to say is interesting.
Steering the Craft by Ursula Le Guin: decent intro to prose writing. Not great, but not bad.
36 Writing Craft Essays by Chuck Palahniuk: This one has a lot of unique insights and was very influential when I started out. One essay is notable for showing his rewriting process going from a first draft to a finish.
Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte: This one really gets into the details on grammar and prose construction. It’s a weird one to recommend, because its style is different from most manuals. Drier, more descriptive than perscriptive. Also has a TON of examples and lots of explanantion of whats going on in them.
How Not to Write a Novel By Howard Mittelmark and SAndra Newman: This one was funny. It’s kinda old, so some of it won’t be new to you, but it’s a decent enough read.
Anatomy of Story by John Truby: This, like many works which go over story structure, is moreso aimed at screenwriters, but by and large it carries over. This one has an interesting model.
Stein on Writing By Sol Stein: writing book from a veteran editor, has a few great insights.
Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain: This is an old book, but a lot of it holds up. Much more about the structure side of things, and there’s a few points here that aren’t emphasized elsewhere. This is the guy who invented motivation reaction units
Writing Fantasy Heroes by various authors: Full disclosure, I only checked out the essay on fight scenes by Brando Sando. That essay is good. Cannot vouch for anything else in here.
Holly Lisle’s various books: She has valuable things to say, I guess, all split across a bunch of short books. Cannot give her a full review because I find her kind of smarmy and at this stage of my development, not insightful enough to be that compelling.
Weird (adjecent to writing, but with relevance)
- How Fiction Works by James Wood: This is weird one, and more on the philosophical/critical side. Talks discurisively about fiction in general, and largely from a reader’s perspective. But it’s also a great book, so I recommend it.
- The Well-Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks: This is a poetry book; has a few applicable insights to writing, however.
- On Writing by Stephen King: I think this was more of a memoir? Has a bunch to say about writing, however, as it recounts his journey as a writer. I never finished this and lost my place in it, so I can’t say too much definitely.
- Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy by Graham Harman: Believe it or not, this ostenisble philosophy book also does a lot to break down what Lovecraft’s prose is doing, and how it does it.
- The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth: This is more of an academic book.
- Clear and Simple as the Truth by Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Turner: I read this book. I have no memory of this book.
- How to Read Literature like a Professor by Thomas Foster, David de Vries, and others: Exactly what it says on the tin.
Books I don’t recommend:
- Elements of Style by Strunk and White (THIS IS A COUNTERRECOMMENDATION. this book is kinda cringe tbh fam and i will stuff you in a locker if i catch you reading it)
- Aspects of the Novel, by Forster (this is old moldy ass boomer book, and it shows. ive heard good things about it, have not powered through it)
- How to Write a Damn Good Novel (and its sequel) by James Frey (im sure this is a solid intro, but it was too basic for me by the time i found it.)
- Save the Cat by Blake Snyder: screenwriting book on structure, i guess? ton o books like this. havent been too interest in it, i read anatomy and shrug. [Editor’s note: I appreciated this liveblog/review.]
← Recent Amendments
There are a few good writing youtube channels I used to watch.
Hello Future Me comes to mind first, having several decent videos a broad range of topics. Of note, the creator has editted and expanding their scripts into several collections of essays On Worldbuilding & Writing, which may merit checking out instead.
It’s difficult to think of other good writing channels. Of the ones I had once subscribed to, few remained of interest.
This tangent was originally in the first section, but I cut it.
In fact, taking this trip down memory lane reminded me of a number of blogs.
It’s a niche corner of writing, but Reductionist Magic is one of the best worldbuilding series I’ve read. Honestly, blog posts about writing merit their own separate list, there must be hundreds of good ones buried in my history.
Another adjacency I’ll mention is sporkings. Which is the say, dunk-filled livereads. I binged a bunch of these when I was first getting into writing — especially, the Eragon sporking, which held a lot of weight to young me because Eragon was a series I’d read and loved when I was even younger.
Adjacent to sporkings is the concept of ‘Immerse Or Die’, a practice described as:
Every morning, the host, Jefferson Smith, gets on his treadmill, opens a new indie ebook, and starts walking. Any book that holds his attention for the duration of that 40:00 minute stroll gets labeled a survivor. But getting there is not easy. Every time he reads something that breaks his immersion in the story— bad grammar, inconsistent worldbuilding, illlogical character behaviors, etc. — that book earns a red flag, called a WTF. If he finds three WTFs, the clock stops, the book closes, and he goes off to write up the report of what went wrong.
It spawned an ill-fated youtube channel of writing advice, a few of which I found illuminating, but I was one of hundreds of people who ever watched these videos.
You can wander through the archives of Immerse or Die, but most links are broken. The creativityhacker.ca site appears to have undergone restructuring in the past few years, and a brief glance at its modern incarnation reveals a preponderance of slop.
Somewhat more relevantly is Lockers All The Way Down a sporking of Worm, a highly influential piece of webfiction, though it transitions to a more insightful review toward the end.
More in the vein of bloggings, I was influenced by Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants.
This page isn’t finished, but it’ll take time and effort to dredge my memory and nicely present its recollections. Let me know if you’re interested.