Updated and improved! Running again, as this post has become an annual favorite.
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 (maybe YOU!), 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
“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
(note: This book is unfortunately out of print. The prices of used copies available on Amazon are sometimes ridiculous. Check to see if your library might have a copy.) “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
“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
“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
“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
“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.”
A Writer’s Diary
“On responding to criticism: I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”
Light the Dark: Writers on Creativity, Inspiration, and the Artistic Process
“A merciless reviser is in a much better position to write a really good book than one who hasn’t got the stomach for it. That may be the distinction between what makes a really good book and a great book.”
A Circle of Quiet
“…a great work of the imagination is one of the highest forms of communication of truth that mankind has reached. But a great piece of literature does not try to coerce you to believe it or to agree with it. A great piece of literature simply is.”
Letters to a Young Poet
“If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.”
Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters by John Steinbeck
“That’s the way it is. You fight a story week after week and day by day and then it arranges itself in your hands.”
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)
“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
“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
“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
“…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
“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
“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
“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.”
Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Good writing always gives pleasure to the ear. But in most good narrative, especially long narrative, it’s less the immediate dazzle of the words than the sounds, rhythms, setting, characters, actions, interactions, dialogue, and feelings all working together that make us hold our breath, and cry…and then turn the page to find out what happens next. And so, until the scene ends, each sentence should lead to the next sentence.”
Here are a few more I look forward to reading soon
Emotional Structure: Creating the Story Beneath the Plot
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Paper Hearts, Volume 1: Some Writing Advice by Beth Revis
Rivet Your Readers with Deep Point of View by Jill Elizabeth Nelson
Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making by Andrew Peterson
Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry by Sage Cohen
A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
What a great list. I have both been a receiver and giver of some of these books! You can’t go wrong with one of these. A blessed Advent and a Merry Christmas to you!
You too, Vijaya.
I enjoyed reading your list! I would love to read Walking on Water…LOVE Madeleine L’Engle!
I’m linking over from Modern Mrs. Darcy,
xo,
Ricki Jill
It’s wonderful. Thanks for stopping by!
Letters to a Young Poet is a good one for reading over the winter holidays, if I remember right. (My copy was loaned some years ago and its whereabouts unknown.)
And of course, love L’Engle and King.
It’s a good one. Short and sweet.