My favorite craft piece of writing is Ann Patchett's THE GETAWAY CAR, an essay (a very, very long essay) in her book THIS IS A STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE.
This is a great list! My must-read on writing craft is Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft - lots of brilliant advice in it, and reading it feels like sitting down for a cuppa with a very wise friend. Off to see if I can track a couple of your recommendations down!
Oooh, I didn't know she wrote that. I've read A Wave in the Mind by Le Guin which is wonderful, but may check out Steering the Craft, once I've checked out Peter's recommendation of the Artful Edit. Le Guin writes so well. Earthsea, Left Hand of Darkness, Lathe of Heaven.
I love both your intentions in this piece, and the execution of it: really excited to add the Koch to my list, after I do some Wendell Berry for the first time!
I was going to make a pitch for "How Fiction Works" too, but JunkMan beat me to the punch - so I'll underscore his points. It was a "Bird By Bird"-style immediate-inspo read for me: his insights on the free-indirect voice in particular really opened me up as a younger writer.
E.B. White's essays on farming and writing always have a durable power for me, too - even when not directly about writer's craft, they are in a sense, since he did both things together throughout his life.
Hope you enjoy! Like JM said, he can get pretentious in places, and has some pretty heavy cosmopolitan preferences in lit and culture - lots of Henry James-type parlor lit in his examples, as I recall. But the insights are durable, and Wood's good company as an analyst/theorist 🤌
I found it gave me a number of useful frameworks and ‘mental models’—and helped me understand I wasn’t the first to ever try to revise. Hope you find it useful!
Good list, Peter! I’ve only read a couple of these (Koch, Lamott). And of course I’ve read The Art of Fiction by Gardner, and I agree, it’s smart but demanding and rather intimidating. I think Gardner’s idea of the story as “a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind” is really the best thing there: if you write with the notion always in mind that you’re constructing such a dream, then you can figure out a lot of good technique on your own with trial and error or with close reading of model texts. It clarifies the work enormously.
I recently read this craft book called Craft in the Real World and as an Asian American writer is really spoke to me. The thesis of the book is basically writing is always going to be consumed through a lens of culture because the way we live and experience our lives is based our culture views/values
As an editor, this is a solid foundation, I'd cut Gardner and Lamott though, most of what they get you can get from better sources at this point because the primary sources have been sublimated into better books. Those Tin House books are fantastic. High information density, somehow I think I have two copies of one of them (I think volume 2.) Sub Wil Storr, The Science of Storytelling, and sub in The First Five Pages, also sub in . (Anyone interested in the biggest takeaway from Lamott here, daily pages. First thing, 750 words, hand written, every day, make writing a practice. It's the single biggest thing that came from the book. There's a website dedicated to it: Google 750 words dot com, 5 bucks a month, worth every penny if you keep it up.)
"I think every working author ought to have a small stable of inspirational authors who they can go back to over and over, reminding them of what they love and what kinds of writing they want to do." - He's right, and most do. If you don't have this list, probably find some, those are your anchor points in a way you don't realize yet if you're just starting out. Choose carefully. Choose your own adventure.
"For all of the value of craft books, there’s only so much studying of craft that one can do. (YOU WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT?!) Reading craft books can become a trap in a number of ways: it can swallow up all of your writing time; it can make you feel like you’re making progress as a writer when you’re actually not putting any words on the page; and it can become too prescriptive-feeling, preventing you from doing any writing since you don’t feel like you can write to the standard or in the style the books suggest." - if a book on writing descends into prescriptivism too deeply, burn it. If it swallows up your writing time, set aside time for writing craft completely contextually separate from your time on the page. I like to keep reference and books I've marked to shit close to hand, and any craft or ancillary book associated on kindle, especially if it's corny.
Bonus Books (Editor's addendum)
- The Story Grid: Written by a long time editor, dude has worked with everyone. Read the book, skip anything outside of it, his partneer turned it into a fucking formula because well, it HAD to be a product. This is not only a great book on storytelling, plot, structure, and a no bullshit look at publishing from a working editor who has a base in science and approaches story as a line between science and commerce, it's also dense. Worth every penny. (Oversized. Advanced)
- Several Short Sentences about Writing: Just trust me
- The Anatomy of Plot and the Anatomy of Story by John Truby: you're welcome.
- Fowler's Dictionary of Modern Usage: Keep a copy, toss Strunk and White on a bonfire.
- ONE GOOD BOOK ON The art/work of EDITING. But as the editor, I'm not sharing my stack again (I have multiple times)
- You WILL laugh, but The 90 Day Novel/ The 90 Day Rewrite (Ottessa Mosfegh finished her first major novel's first draft using it. I've used it, it's not bad if you know what to leave on the floor.)
- A Practical Handbook for the Actor: You'll either understand why shortly, or you'll never get it.
- The Neuroscience of Creativity: Because.
- ONE GOOD BOOK ON THE ACTUAL BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING (Merchants of Culture springs to mind)
- Stopping, my "craft" book suggestions only get more arcane and less connected directly to writing from here on out. (Hyperobjects. Lewis Hyde, who is an anthropologist for god's sake, Victor Turner, etc.)
Side note: Burn Campbell aside from to have said you've read him, the hero story is not universal, but is very western culturally coded (oh, guy was a bit of a fuckin' Nazi too). Burn anything having to do with Kill the cat, save the cat, whatever. Beat sheet writing is proscriptive to the point of people turning it into religion. Happens easier than you'd imagine and suddenly you're trying to pin down exactly when your dark night of the soul is on page 32 and crying because that's not how YOUR story works. (Reddit r/writing is the bowels of hell)
Comments: Consider this wins over On Writing. More prescient and more relevant, On Writing has too much paff and while I agree with him on some things (fuck adverbs, sit down and get to work, et al), the book is like ALL King books, bloated, could have been cut by half.
There is an article from Zadie Smith in the Believer Vol. 48 (yes, a magazine.) I ordered the back issue and keep it near JUST because of that article. That says something.
Can’t fight you about my ‘There’s only so much craft you can read’ comment now; have to fight you about your suggested cutting of Gardner and Lamott first. (Thanks for the read, as per usual, and the list, friend. I’m going to order a back copy of that issue of The Believer, too!)
Excellent, thanks. I did not know about some of these. Your point about not falling into the trap of everlastingly "getting ready" to write is really important.
I would recommend "How Fiction Works" (James Wood), which changed everything for me. It has an especially brilliant take on choosing point of view and how to use detail and exposition. A few stretches of the book wax a bit academic, but it's totally worth it to get to the pearls.
A lot of people recommend John Barth's essays about writing, although I have not read them yet myself. One concept of his that has influenced me strongly: fiction as a spell the writer casts over the reader, drawing them into a sustained illusion. My goal is to avoid anything that breaks the spell.
Yes! Similarly, I’ve always been most fond of the comparison to a fictional ‘dream,’ the ‘night dream’ as opposed to the fantasy ‘day dream,’ per the Bauer text I mentioned, I believe (unless it was Rust Hill).
Speaking of a waking dream: I am reading "Lincoln in the Bardo" for the first time. It's truly a wonder. Do I need to cut a deal with the devil to be able to write this way? Or just read a lot more "How to write" books?
Yes, indeed I am in story club and loving it. I’ve already learned so much that I’m applying to my short fiction writing. The essay this week about causality was a real revelation to me. How about you?
Great, me too! It's inspired me to revise more. Yes, the essay on causality was a good one. One of my takeaways is that different writers will hit upon drastically different pathways that seem like natural causality. It's got me thinking about Occam's Razor. This interplay between creative invention and parsimony.
Yes and it ties in very well with what he said a few weeks ago in the essay about pacing. That the reader assumes you are telling them things for a reason, so when they get to the “pay off” after the set up they experience a moment of recognition. That’s not exactly causality but I think it has a similar function in making stories. I’m going to be asking myself those questions when I get to the next round of endless revising of the junk man tales.
I hadn’t read Lamott until a copy of her "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" came into my bookshop. I stopped to skim a few passages before shelving it, expecting the same heavy-handed spirituality I’d found in much of Christian non-fiction. Instead, I found a revelatory lack of sanctimony and refreshing candor.
Since then, I’ve grabbed every Lamott book I could find.
thank you for sharing this list. you've got me wondering if Joyce Carol Oats ever wrote about writing as she's someone I turn to regularly because admire (am haunted by?) her style
You’re welcome! And thanks for the sub! Perhaps my favorite little bit in that is her inclusion of a Kafka fragment about ‘the sirens.’ Very JCO. Check it out when it arrives!
Stephen King, On Writing, and Chuck Palahnuik, Consider This, are both excellent. Practical, a pleasure to read, and contemporary.
My favorite craft piece of writing is Ann Patchett's THE GETAWAY CAR, an essay (a very, very long essay) in her book THIS IS A STORY OF A HAPPY MARRIAGE.
Yes! I read that collection a few years ago in parallel with Richard Russo’s collection The Destiny Thief! Both are very good!
This is a great list! My must-read on writing craft is Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft - lots of brilliant advice in it, and reading it feels like sitting down for a cuppa with a very wise friend. Off to see if I can track a couple of your recommendations down!
Oooh, I didn't know she wrote that. I've read A Wave in the Mind by Le Guin which is wonderful, but may check out Steering the Craft, once I've checked out Peter's recommendation of the Artful Edit. Le Guin writes so well. Earthsea, Left Hand of Darkness, Lathe of Heaven.
Ooh I hadn't heard of A Wave in the Mind! Thank you, adding it to the endlessly long TBR list.
You're very welcome! Right there with you on the long TBR list, which for me shifts in order frequently.
I love both your intentions in this piece, and the execution of it: really excited to add the Koch to my list, after I do some Wendell Berry for the first time!
I was going to make a pitch for "How Fiction Works" too, but JunkMan beat me to the punch - so I'll underscore his points. It was a "Bird By Bird"-style immediate-inspo read for me: his insights on the free-indirect voice in particular really opened me up as a younger writer.
E.B. White's essays on farming and writing always have a durable power for me, too - even when not directly about writer's craft, they are in a sense, since he did both things together throughout his life.
With both you and Junkman advocating it, it’s clear I’m going to have to pick up this Wood book!
Hope you enjoy! Like JM said, he can get pretentious in places, and has some pretty heavy cosmopolitan preferences in lit and culture - lots of Henry James-type parlor lit in his examples, as I recall. But the insights are durable, and Wood's good company as an analyst/theorist 🤌
Perfect timing! Going to look into these. Thanks, Peter.
You’re the real deal, Andrew: already published to acclaim and still pursuing further study of craft!
Forever a student of the game!
The Artful Edit appealed to me. I ordered it.
I found it gave me a number of useful frameworks and ‘mental models’—and helped me understand I wasn’t the first to ever try to revise. Hope you find it useful!
Cool. Looking forward to the read.
Good list, Peter! I’ve only read a couple of these (Koch, Lamott). And of course I’ve read The Art of Fiction by Gardner, and I agree, it’s smart but demanding and rather intimidating. I think Gardner’s idea of the story as “a vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind” is really the best thing there: if you write with the notion always in mind that you’re constructing such a dream, then you can figure out a lot of good technique on your own with trial and error or with close reading of model texts. It clarifies the work enormously.
I love Bird by Bird. Good reminder to read it again!!
I did a brief post on the biggest writing mistakes that I see new writers do here. It has one like. lol. I tried.
Can you link to it?
https://open.substack.com/pub/ewbishop4/p/a-break-from-the-weird-for-a-brief?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1zwuck
I recently read this craft book called Craft in the Real World and as an Asian American writer is really spoke to me. The thesis of the book is basically writing is always going to be consumed through a lens of culture because the way we live and experience our lives is based our culture views/values
As an editor, this is a solid foundation, I'd cut Gardner and Lamott though, most of what they get you can get from better sources at this point because the primary sources have been sublimated into better books. Those Tin House books are fantastic. High information density, somehow I think I have two copies of one of them (I think volume 2.) Sub Wil Storr, The Science of Storytelling, and sub in The First Five Pages, also sub in . (Anyone interested in the biggest takeaway from Lamott here, daily pages. First thing, 750 words, hand written, every day, make writing a practice. It's the single biggest thing that came from the book. There's a website dedicated to it: Google 750 words dot com, 5 bucks a month, worth every penny if you keep it up.)
"I think every working author ought to have a small stable of inspirational authors who they can go back to over and over, reminding them of what they love and what kinds of writing they want to do." - He's right, and most do. If you don't have this list, probably find some, those are your anchor points in a way you don't realize yet if you're just starting out. Choose carefully. Choose your own adventure.
"For all of the value of craft books, there’s only so much studying of craft that one can do. (YOU WANNA FIGHT ABOUT IT?!) Reading craft books can become a trap in a number of ways: it can swallow up all of your writing time; it can make you feel like you’re making progress as a writer when you’re actually not putting any words on the page; and it can become too prescriptive-feeling, preventing you from doing any writing since you don’t feel like you can write to the standard or in the style the books suggest." - if a book on writing descends into prescriptivism too deeply, burn it. If it swallows up your writing time, set aside time for writing craft completely contextually separate from your time on the page. I like to keep reference and books I've marked to shit close to hand, and any craft or ancillary book associated on kindle, especially if it's corny.
Bonus Books (Editor's addendum)
- The Story Grid: Written by a long time editor, dude has worked with everyone. Read the book, skip anything outside of it, his partneer turned it into a fucking formula because well, it HAD to be a product. This is not only a great book on storytelling, plot, structure, and a no bullshit look at publishing from a working editor who has a base in science and approaches story as a line between science and commerce, it's also dense. Worth every penny. (Oversized. Advanced)
- Several Short Sentences about Writing: Just trust me
- The Anatomy of Plot and the Anatomy of Story by John Truby: you're welcome.
- Fowler's Dictionary of Modern Usage: Keep a copy, toss Strunk and White on a bonfire.
- ONE GOOD BOOK ON The art/work of EDITING. But as the editor, I'm not sharing my stack again (I have multiple times)
- You WILL laugh, but The 90 Day Novel/ The 90 Day Rewrite (Ottessa Mosfegh finished her first major novel's first draft using it. I've used it, it's not bad if you know what to leave on the floor.)
- A Practical Handbook for the Actor: You'll either understand why shortly, or you'll never get it.
- The Neuroscience of Creativity: Because.
- ONE GOOD BOOK ON THE ACTUAL BUSINESS OF PUBLISHING (Merchants of Culture springs to mind)
- Stopping, my "craft" book suggestions only get more arcane and less connected directly to writing from here on out. (Hyperobjects. Lewis Hyde, who is an anthropologist for god's sake, Victor Turner, etc.)
Side note: Burn Campbell aside from to have said you've read him, the hero story is not universal, but is very western culturally coded (oh, guy was a bit of a fuckin' Nazi too). Burn anything having to do with Kill the cat, save the cat, whatever. Beat sheet writing is proscriptive to the point of people turning it into religion. Happens easier than you'd imagine and suddenly you're trying to pin down exactly when your dark night of the soul is on page 32 and crying because that's not how YOUR story works. (Reddit r/writing is the bowels of hell)
Comments: Consider this wins over On Writing. More prescient and more relevant, On Writing has too much paff and while I agree with him on some things (fuck adverbs, sit down and get to work, et al), the book is like ALL King books, bloated, could have been cut by half.
There is an article from Zadie Smith in the Believer Vol. 48 (yes, a magazine.) I ordered the back issue and keep it near JUST because of that article. That says something.
Can’t fight you about my ‘There’s only so much craft you can read’ comment now; have to fight you about your suggested cutting of Gardner and Lamott first. (Thanks for the read, as per usual, and the list, friend. I’m going to order a back copy of that issue of The Believer, too!)
Lamott And Gardner are outmoded.
Can’t say in that impressed with a lot of what I’ve read lately, and am pretty fond of some older stuff. Think I’ll stick with the outmoded.
Love you, pick better.
Incorporate it into the new flesh, discard the husks.
Excellent, thanks. I did not know about some of these. Your point about not falling into the trap of everlastingly "getting ready" to write is really important.
I would recommend "How Fiction Works" (James Wood), which changed everything for me. It has an especially brilliant take on choosing point of view and how to use detail and exposition. A few stretches of the book wax a bit academic, but it's totally worth it to get to the pearls.
A lot of people recommend John Barth's essays about writing, although I have not read them yet myself. One concept of his that has influenced me strongly: fiction as a spell the writer casts over the reader, drawing them into a sustained illusion. My goal is to avoid anything that breaks the spell.
Yes! Similarly, I’ve always been most fond of the comparison to a fictional ‘dream,’ the ‘night dream’ as opposed to the fantasy ‘day dream,’ per the Bauer text I mentioned, I believe (unless it was Rust Hill).
Speaking of a waking dream: I am reading "Lincoln in the Bardo" for the first time. It's truly a wonder. Do I need to cut a deal with the devil to be able to write this way? Or just read a lot more "How to write" books?
Are you in Story Club? Pretty wonderful Substack.
Yes, indeed I am in story club and loving it. I’ve already learned so much that I’m applying to my short fiction writing. The essay this week about causality was a real revelation to me. How about you?
Great, me too! It's inspired me to revise more. Yes, the essay on causality was a good one. One of my takeaways is that different writers will hit upon drastically different pathways that seem like natural causality. It's got me thinking about Occam's Razor. This interplay between creative invention and parsimony.
Yes and it ties in very well with what he said a few weeks ago in the essay about pacing. That the reader assumes you are telling them things for a reason, so when they get to the “pay off” after the set up they experience a moment of recognition. That’s not exactly causality but I think it has a similar function in making stories. I’m going to be asking myself those questions when I get to the next round of endless revising of the junk man tales.
Bird by Bird is my favorite book on writing.
I hadn’t read Lamott until a copy of her "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith" came into my bookshop. I stopped to skim a few passages before shelving it, expecting the same heavy-handed spirituality I’d found in much of Christian non-fiction. Instead, I found a revelatory lack of sanctimony and refreshing candor.
Since then, I’ve grabbed every Lamott book I could find.
thank you for sharing this list. you've got me wondering if Joyce Carol Oats ever wrote about writing as she's someone I turn to regularly because admire (am haunted by?) her style
I have a copy of the book on my shelf at home and was going to take a pic but didn’t want to wait!
i bought it! thank you!!
You’re welcome! And thanks for the sub! Perhaps my favorite little bit in that is her inclusion of a Kafka fragment about ‘the sirens.’ Very JCO. Check it out when it arrives!
She has an anthology called Telling Stories: an Anthology for Writers, and I think there’s some commentary on writing in there!
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/telling-stories-an-anthology-for-writers_joyce-carol-oates/254658/item/19251611/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=high_vol_midlist_standard_shopping_customer_acquisition_20381777654&utm_adgroup=&utm_term=&utm_content=666157863328&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=20381777654&gbraid=0AAAAADwY45h0i7zo94xJs3ZNuG8hccO4q&gclid=Cj0KCQjwzt_FBhCEARIsAJGFWVn50_s-Ly1A7t8dCsjV1Cj1z4Q8RpLBBIBNGXj_2yxEmnAWYEjf_cAaApb3EALw_wcB#idiq=19251611&edition=3693571
did you really just google that for me?! thank you so so much!!
Most writers are using AI. What is the creativity in it?
https://open.substack.com/pub/hungstory/p/frankenstein-the-aimonster-that-we?r=4mfznb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
“Write Your Novel From The Middle,” by James Scott Bell, and “Techniques of the Selling Writer,” by Dwight Swain, were transformative for me.
AMK—thank you for these additional titles! The first sounds especially appealing to me!