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From the newly published to the invaluable classic, our list of essential books for creative writers.
In this collection of nine essays, Debra Spark delves into the elements of craft that make for effective and resonant storytelling, sharing personal anecdotes and humorous observations along the way. Spark brings critical insights and engaging candor to key issues integral to fiction writing such as emotion, style and voice, the origins of creative inspiration, beginnings and endings, and relevance to contemporary world issues.
“Like looking directly at the sun, looking directly at the creation of intimacy in fiction seems like a dangerous business.” This installment of Graywolf’s “Art of” series examines the various ways authors, including Joan Didion, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf, have approached the challenge of crafting intimate relationships on the page, between friends, lovers, family members, and enemies. Writers will be inspired by D’Erasmo’s insights on methods of portraying the complexity of true connections between characters, and her emphasis on building intimacy between author and reader.
The inaugural title in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry is actually a pair of books, packaged as one, that includes talks on poetry delivered in New York City, Chicago, Seattle, and other cities across the United States in 2014. In The Lives of the Poems, Joshua Beckman, an editor at Wave, offers three variations of the same talk that—through repetition and adjustment—illuminate the intimate experience of making a particular set of poems. In Three Talks, he explores the fluid social dynamics of poetry as it lives between readers, poems, and books. A unique presentation of personal, intellectually curious, and provocative talks, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks provides rare insights into a deeply literary life.
“The essays gathered in this volume contain reading suggestions and imprecations, records of enthusiasms, pieces that start with particular books and move toward the larger subject of how and what and why we read....” In this essay collection, literary critic and novelist Francine Prose examines the enduring value found in reading literature by authors including Roberto Bolaño, Jennifer Egan, George Eliot, and Mohsin Hamid, taking a closer look at the craft of writing on the sentence level. By reflecting on the specific elements of writing that can provide for powerfully transformative and transportive reading experiences, Prose offers writers an opportunity to approach their own work from new angles and with fresh inspiration.
“Life might be hard, but art? This we can do. Together.” Francesca Lia Block’s The Thorn Necklace is a prescriptive memoir examining the interrelationship between life’s challenges and artistic practice, and the transformative potential of creative writing as a healing process. Block shares lively anecdotes from her personal life and from exemplary literature, and provides numerous exercises on narrative development for writers of both prose and poetry seeking to channel their own creative energy and experiences into powerful storytelling.
The Business of Being a Writer is a comprehensive guide to the publishing industry for writers with chapters covering topics such as “Online and Digital Media,” “Researching Agents and Publishers,” “The Basics of Book Launches,” and “Crowdfunding and Donations.” Friedman provides in-depth and current knowledge to help writers position themselves for a long-term career of writing, sharing her expertise and advice on fundamental business principles and the benefits of using digital tools and online media.
In this updated, tenth anniversary edition of Writing Life Stories, Bill Roorbach and Kristen Keckler offer techniques and advice for writing creative nonfiction and how to begin writing about your life experiences. The book includes prompts, such as drawing maps of remembered neighborhoods and reflecting on old photographs, as well as considerations of the ethics of creative nonfiction, trends in the memoir genre, and practical guidance on background research, character development, and shaping compelling scenes.
This anthology focusing on lyric poetry gathers essays by David Baker and Ann Townsend, as well as other poets and critics such as Linda Gregerson, Carl Phillips, and Stanley Plumly, whose writing exploring the form ranges from conversational to investigative, from practical to enlightening. Divided into two parts, lyric modes and lyric means, the essays will be helpful to poets interested in the historical origins and evolution of lyric poetry, the different strategies used to create meaning, and its present status in contemporary literature.
“I dreamed of a book like a friend also traveling through the night, a friend with a compass, and secrets to share about her own experience,” writes Bonnie Friedman in the introduction to Writing Past Dark, which she hopes will act as a supportive companion for writers. In this essay collection about the emotional side of the writing life, Friedman explores, and offers strategies for dealing with, an array of inner dilemmas that writers face, including feelings of envy, guilt, distraction, and writer’s block. Originally published in 1993, the collection may take on a new relevance in the current digital age, where literary successes, critiques, and debates are regularly shared publicly.
Written in a clear and straightforward style, novelist Ross Raisin’s book is an indispensable guide through essential elements of craft for fiction writing such as planning, research, characters, point of view, dialogue, and editing. Each of the book’s three sections is filled with helpful tips and exercises, and exemplary passages by authors including Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, James Joyce, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith.
Thomas C. Foster, professor emeritus of English at the University of Michigan, Flint, provides an in-depth examination of the inner workings of the poetic form through the lens of the inquisitive reader. In fifteen chapters split into the three sections (What Is Poetry?, How Is Poetry?, and Why Is Poetry?), Foster explores the ways technical elements like sound, sense, rhythm, symbols, imagery, and music are crafted by the poet in order to inform the audience’s reading experience. With knowledgeable insights and explanations, the book offers poets of all levels a refreshed perspective of their own writing.
Unlike most craft books, this collection of lyric essays about the experiences at the intersection of lived life and literary life is not prescriptive and offers no advice for composition or revision. Instead the author of five books, including Not Merely Because of the Unknown That Was Stalking Toward Them (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011), lingers on the joys and challenges of the uncertainty that accompanies creative work. The result is a slim book that captures an author’s practice and the relationships she draws between writing and falling in love, dreaming, and memory.
In Behind the Book, Chris Mackenzie Jones, marketing and communications director at the Loft Literary Center, examines the complete writing and publishing timelines of debut books by authors of various genres, including Brian Benson, Edan Lepucki, Courtney Maum, Eric Smith, and Monona Wali. From generating ideas and writing process, to revision and polishing, to publication and its aftermath, this book assists writers in navigating the many potential paths and strategies for successfully publishing a first book.
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form delves into the tools of meter, rhyme, and stanza in poetry. In this 1979 revised edition, which adds a new chapter on free verse, Paul Fussell offers an overview of the history of these tools, as well as practical advice for applying them. The two-part book addresses writers who are seeking to improve their poetic techniques, but it is also intended “to help aspiring readers deepen their sensitivity to the rhythmical and formal properties of poetry and thus heighten their pleasure and illumination.”
“Writing has been the primary way I have tried to make sense of my losses, including deaths.” In The Art of Death, Edwidge Danticat shifts from a memoiristic account of dealing with her mother’s death, to examining how other authors, poets, and philosophers have used literature to make sense of death, loss, mourning, and finding peace. Writers can find inspiration in Danticat’s insights on the value that integrating themes of sorrow and renewal can bring to a work of literature and its creator.
This revised and expanded edition, with a foreword by novelist Dennis Lehane, is a thorough and practical how-to guide for writing a first novel divided into two parts. The first section, written by young adult novelist Laura Whitcomb, provides guidance through the writing process from initial ideas and preparations, to fleshing out the plot and going through revisions. The second section, written by literary agent Ann Rittenberg, goes through the steps of acquiring and working with an agent to the publication of a first book. Interspersed are writing exercises, tips, and firsthand accounts from authors sharing their experiences in publishing.
The author of a dozen books of poetry as well as three books about poetry, including Poetry as Survival (University of Georgia Press, 2002), Orr delivers an innovative and accessible guide based on the notion of turning “worlds into words,” using close readings of poems such as Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” The primer also provides a dozen writing exercises and a glossary of terms that is useful for new and emerging poets alike.
From the author of the memoir, A Life in Stitches (Chronicle Books, 2011), this guidebook goes through the entire process of drafting a memoir: from preliminary conception of ideas and direction, to organizing and outlining narrative structure and themes, planning character arc, revising, and getting published. With a humorous tone and a straightforward style, Herron provides experienced advice on managing friends and family, overcoming worries and other obstacles, and practicing self-care.
Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology combines elements of an introductory textbook, encyclopedia, and anthology into one comprehensive volume on the craft of poetry. Amorak Huey and W. Todd Kaneko provide in-depth discussions of thirty-eight components of poetry, in alphabetical order from ambiguity to work, that they consider “the building materials and tools every poet relies on when making a poem.” The anthology section covers twenty poetic modes (list poems, love poems, and protest poems to name a few), each illustrated with acclaimed contemporary poetry by poets including Natalie Diaz, Terrance Hayes, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong.
Literature Class is a collection of eight lectures delivered by renowned Argentine author Julio Cortázar while visiting the University of California in Berkeley in 1980, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver and edited by Carles Álvarez Garriga. In these talks, which are occasionally directed or rerouted by students’ questions and interjections, Cortázar shares insights into his personal experiences dealing with the challenges of writing short stories and novels. His inquisitive discussions on elements such as time, fate, realism, musicality, humor, and eroticism will provide new approaches to language and storytelling, and a refreshed perspective for writers seeking inspiration.
In The Writer’s Field Guide to the Craft of Fiction, Michael Noll presents as single excerpted page from forty different contemporary novels and short stories in order to examine and point out specific writing techniques. These insightful discussions and analyses are followed by practical writing prompts and exercises, such as how to “write pretty” or how to “move through time space,” that will motivate writers to approach their craft with refreshed perspective.
Write Smart, Write Happy is a book for managing the ups and downs of the writing life, which often includes obstacles such as writer’s block, rejection, procrastination, and general self-doubt. Readers and writers will appreciate Cheryl St. John’s straightforward and practical guide divided into seven parts and covering career planning, setting goals and priorities, maintaining interpersonal relationships, honing time management skills, and defining success.
“When we have a problem, we look for advice—what do others do? Not so we can replicate their strategies, but so we can listen, consider, begin to make wordless decisions deep in the cerebral mass. It is the conversation that is useful, rather than the single instruction,” writes Susan Grimm in her introduction to Ordering the Storm. The book is comprised of essays by eleven poets, including Maggie Anderson, Wanda Coleman, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, and Bonnie Jacobson, reflecting on the process of assembling a collection of poetry. The essays offer a range of perspectives and approaches to the task of arranging poems while providing a sense of community with each voice and insight.
In FLASH!, John Dufresne provides an introductory examination of flash fiction, exploring the elements that distinguish very brief fiction from longer stories, and how this literary form is particularly suitable for the twenty-first century. The book contains dozens of writing prompts and exercises, as well as samples of short short stories that demonstrate an expansive range of styles and techniques.
In From Language to Creative Writing, Philip Seargeant and Bill Greenwell combine language studies and the practice of creative writing to create an informative and useful guide for writers interested in manipulating the structures of the English language for the purpose of crafting poetry and prose. Chapters cover topics such as “Speech and conversation,” “Context, time and point of view,” and “‘Literary’ language,” and include exemplary passages as well as writing activities and exercises.
