Some Useful Books

First, the exciting news (exciting for me, anyway): I have just signed the contract to do a collection of these blog posts (selected, edited, and occasionally augmented) on writing for Diversion Books. It should be coming out in December as an e-book with a hard-copy option (so folks have something to wrap for under the tree). I’m having a lot of fun revisiting and revising older posts…and I’m rather astonished at just how many of them there are to choose from. Doing a blog twice a week for four and a half years adds up.

This has, as you might expect, got me thinking about how one goes about explaining fiction writing and how to do it to other people. Which leads me to look at how other writers have explained writing in their how-to-write books. The thing that makes this more than a bit difficult is one of the fundamental premises of this blog: There Is No One True Way.

For years, I have had a shelf of basic how-to-write books that I recommend to would-be writers. The interesting thing is that, unless I am talking to a large group, I don’t recommend all of them to everybody at the same time. I talk to the writer for a bit about how they work and what things they’re having particular problems with, and I try to recommend the how-to-write books that I think will do the best job of explaining stuff to them. Which depends a lot on their process.

For instance, I have a thin little paperback titled Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. It came highly recommended by a friend, and I like Bradbury’s work, so I got it and read it. It did nothing at all for me…but I recommend it highly to people who seem to have that kind of holistic, zen-like process, and I have seen it be a lightbulb-like revelation for quite a few of them.

Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird is a classic book on writing that I recommend to the nervous and insecure, to folks with a major Internal Editor problem, and to people who are so determined to write mainstream/literary fiction that they get twitchy if I tell them to read a how-to-write book by a genre fiction writer. Ms. Lamott talks a lot about writers’ states-of-mind and emotions, so this is also good for folks who worry a lot that they are doing something wrong, or that other writers are more confident or don’t have these problems. It’s fun, funny, and true, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Linda Seger’s How to Make a Good Script Great is technically about writing movie scripts, but it is possibly the best analysis of the three-, four-, and five-act structures that I have ever seen. I recommend it to people who are strongly visual (because, movies) and, obviously, to folks having trouble with the act structure (usually with the caveat that they’ll have to ignore her strictures on page count, because those are based on a 120-page screenplay, and most novels are a lot longer than 120 manuscript pages).

My favorite how-to-write book comes with a large caveat. It’s Lars Eighner’s Lavender Blue: How to Write and Sell Gay Men’s Erotica, also titled The Elements of Arousal, and it is not suitable for younger would-be writers or folks easily put off by the sort of example sentences you might expect to find in something with that title. It is, however, a brilliant book that covers skills any fiction writer will find useful – and I defy anyone to ever again mix up passive voice with the progressive tenses after reading his explanation and examples.

For a more general audience, I recommend Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, partly because I think it is one of the best titles ever for a how-to-write book. It’s a collection of some of the how-to columns he wrote for Writer’s Digest Magazine, and it is good, solid, basic practical advice. He has several other how-to-write collections which are also good, but he only got to use that title once.

Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones is another good one for the holistic, zen-process type of writer. Like the Bradbury title mentioned above, I don’t find it personally useful, but I know plenty of people who love it and find it useful to reread regularly. So I recommend it to people who seem to have a process similar to the folks I already know love the book and find it useful.

Ursula le Guin’s Steering the Craft is the only book with writing exercises in it that I have ever found interesting and useful. It’s more of an intermediate-how-to book than one for beginners, and there aren’t very many of those around. With one or two exceptions, it’s not looking at things you’re likely to learn from working on any old random story (how often do you need to write a grammatically correct 300-word sentence, or 100 words composed of sentences that are all seven words or fewer?), which is why I like it, but that can be frustrating for someone who just wants to know the basics of dialog or scene construction or character development.

Brenda Ueland’s If You Want To Write was written in 1938 and has been reprinted periodically since then; I fell in love with it when I opened it to read the chapter titles and got to “X. Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It For Their Writing.” Like Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones, it isn’t going to provide practical hints on writing action or a step-by-step guide to a dialog scene; it’s more about attitude and commitment and creativity and, yes, Art. I like it anyway.

I have an entire bookcase full of how-to-write books, but these are the ones I keep recommending to people.

Then there’s the permanent computer shelf, meaning the shelf of books that I can reach by swiveling my computer chair around. There are actually two shelves; one has usually got the research books for whatever I’m working on, and the other has a permanent set of writing reference books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence, my battered copy of Roget’s Thesaurus that dates from college, the Oxford American Dictionary with half the cover missing, the two-volume squint-eye version of The Oxford English Dictionary, and the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. I’ve used most of them for twenty or thirty years, and I don’t have to refer to them as often as I used to (especially the basic grammar and punctuation ones), but they’re still there, just in case I need them.