Books to Give the Writer in Your Life

I love to read about writing. These books teach me, encourage me, and help me remember I’m not alone on this journey. My creative struggles and triumphs have all been experienced before. If you’re looking for gift ideas for the writer in your life, this list of my favorites, broken down into books on craft and books on the writing life, is a great place to start. Instead of my own description, I’m letting a quote speak for each book. Note: these books are decidedly fiction focused. That said, writers of all stripes can make a home in these pages.

The Writing Life

Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Oreland

“Making art…means working in the face of uncertainty; it means living with doubt and contradiction, doing something no one much cares whether you do, and for which there may be neither audience nor reward…Making the work you want to make means finding nourishment within the work itself.”

A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children by Katherine Paterson

“I will not take a young reader through a story and in the end abandon him. That is, I will not write a book that closes in despair. I cannot, will not, withhold from my young readers the harsh realities of human hunger and suffering and loss, but neither will I neglect to plant that stubborn seed of hope that has enabled our race to outlast wars and famines and destruction and death.”

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle

“Over the years I have come to recognize that the work often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully. The great artists, the rivers and tributaries, collaborate with the work, but for most of us, it is our greatest privilege to be its servant.”

If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland

“No writing is a waste of time – no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work. With every sentence you write, you have learned something. It has done you good.”

Views from a Window Seat: Thoughts on Writing and Life by Jeannine Atkins

“Writing reminds me that life isn’t all beginnings and endings, but circles. Just as spring winds back to winter, finished goes back to not. My writing means lots of looping and splitting, moving back as much as forward, revising as I research, and researching as I revise. After staring down commas, I’m glad to be reckless again with punctuation, and even straightening my back and walking smack into mistakes. I put wrong words down on paper so I can find ones that might be right.”

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair — the sense that you can never completely put on the page what is in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed…You can come to it…because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”

Craft

Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel (Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere) by Lisa Cron

“Whose life will you utterly upend?…Rather than asking who will run through your novel’s preordained gauntlet of challenge, the goal is figure out who you’ll build that gauntlet to test.”

The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl Klein

“I believe that the number one thing that hooks readers is authority — a sense that the writer is in complete control of the story and how it’s being told. An author with authority isn’t in a rush to give away the central plot line of the book in the first page, because she knows she has a good plot, and she takes the time to set it up right. Nor is he sucking up to or desperate to attract the reader…Rather, she can offer little details, hints, shafts of light that illuminate the characters and world that’s about to open up to us, and help us get anchored within that world, so when the inciting incident happens, we readers already have an emotional relationship with the setting and the characters. The action then leads us to become even more deeply involved with them.”

The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler

“A myth… is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth.”

The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction by James Alexander Thom

“…You, the writer of the historical novel, will have to put your readers down in the middle of that unfamiliar place called the past, in such a way that they won’t feel alien or bewildered by strangeness…make them feel at home in that time.”

Writing Irresistible Kidlit: The Ultimate Guide to Crafting Fiction for Young Adult and Middle Grade Readers by Mary Kole

“Choices are especially fertile moments of tension for your character. Don’t make decisions easy for your fictional people. Nothing should ever be so black and white as to make a choice or action easy. Give your characters two shades of the same issue that are complicated by their existing identity and values.”

Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise by Darcy Pattison

“The connection between the inner and outer arcs, the emotional arc and the plot arc isn’t always easy to see! When you set up an initial plot conflict, you need to immediately ask yourself what obligatory action scene is set up. When the inner conflict is set up, you need to ask what epiphany is set up.”

Writing the Breakout Novel: Insider Advice for Taking Your Fiction to the Next Level by Donald Maass

“Breakout novels are written from an author’s passionate need to make you understand, to expose you to someone special or to drag you somewhere that it is important for you to see. No breakout novel leaves us feeling neutral.”

Here are a few more I look forward to reading soon:

A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf

Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process by Joe Fassler

A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle

Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot by Pete Dunne

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke