If you want to be writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut.
On Writing, Stephen King
9 writing books to inspire your creativity
Here are nine writing books to inspire your craft and creative spirit with a taste of what each focuses on.
1. Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life – Dani Shapiro
I love a sub-title and include them all for this list! This one for Still Writing sums up beautifully what this book is all about. It provides vignettes on the craft of writing and living a creative life, day in, day out. The best books on writing take you inside what it’s like to live a writing life, as well as giving you advice and tips for the journey. Still Life takes us through aspects of the writing process as a lived experience structured around Beginnings, Middles and Ends. It’s gentle and encouraging, full of gems to inspire your journey.
Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us your humanity. It’s your job. (p32)
2. The Situation and the Story: the Art of Personal Narrative – Vivian Gornick
It took me a long time to work out what genre I wanted to write in. This book helped me work out that it was personal narrative. ‘The Situation and the Story’ is a deep-dive on the art and technique of personal narrative. Growing out of 15 years of teaching in MFA programs, it covers examples of the craft of personal narrative such as Loren Eiseley’s magnificent, ‘All the Strange Hours: the Excavation of a Life’ and Beryl Markham’s ‘West with the Night’. If like me, you aspire to write personal narrative or memoir, this is a fabulous handbook for the craft.
The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker–the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience–it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn. (p25)
3. One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft – Susan M Tiberghien
This books is structured around a one year journey through and to a writing life. There are 12 genre-based lessons to deepen your writing craft. They are focused around areas like: journal writing, personal essays, opinion and travel essays, short stories, dialogue and poetic prose. These 12 workshops drawn from over 15 years of teaching combine inspiration and teaching and focus on creative practice as a habit. The idea is that as you work through the 12 lessons, one a month over a year, you shape the habit of your creative practice.
A person who writes has the habit of writing. The word habit refers to a routine, but also to a stole, to a costume befitting a calling. In the same way that a monk puts on a traditional habit, so the writer puts on a traditional habit. As writers we find where we are comfortable and with a stole over our shoulders, we write. (p ix)
4. If You Want to Write: Releasing your Creative Spirit – Brenda Ueland
This is a 1938 classic on releasing the natural writing spirit that is within all of us. It takes a very egalitarian and encouraging stance. Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Everybody Is Talented, Original and Has Something Important To Say and the book continues this theme and spirit. This is such a wise book on writing and creativity, often cited in people’s lists of favourite creativity books. It is heart-filled and conversational in style, inspiring confidence and the ability to write with every page.
I want to assure you, with all earnestness, that 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. It has stretched your understanding. (p15)
5. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within – Natalie Goldberg
Another writing classic, published in 1996, Writing Down the Bones is made up of short zen-style reads that focus on freeing us up to write. She focuses on simplifying and streamlining the process rather than adding rules. It’s about voice and story stripped back to their essence as a starting point for creativity. And it’s all very common sense and practical, instilling confidence. If like me, you’ve acquired years of other people’s voices and corporate styles, this book is a palate cleanser and reminder to get back to your own writing voice, style and message.
Writing practice embraces your whole life and doesn’t demand any logical form: no Chapter 19 following the action of Chapter 18….It is undirected and has to do with all of you right in your present moment. Think of writing practice as loving arms you come to illogically and incoherently. (p13)
6. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft – Stephen King
Another writing book that often appears as a favourite on the art and life of writing, this classic by veteran author Stephen King is part memoir and part writing class. Very down to earth, it’s honed from years of sitting down to write and creating book after book. King takes the fluff out of writing practice and encourages us to as well. His memorable and direct advice on adverbs has stayed with me: “The adverb is not your friend.”
If you want to be writer, you must do two things above all: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I am aware of, no shortcut. (p145)
7. Your Life as Story: Discovering the “New Autobiography” and Writing Memoir as Literature – Tristine Rainer
Tristine Rainer’s The New Diary was a seminal book inspiring my creativity and is featured in 36 Books. Your Life as Story continues the theme of life story as writing practice and creative source. Tristine Rainer’s specialty is autobiography and in this book she focuses on the evolution of autobiography as literature. The techniques for its practice are outlined including: genres of the self, truth, finding your voice and elements of story structure in autobiography. It’s a valuable read on the craft of memoir and autobiography for aspiring and practicing writers in this field.
If you complete even one short autobiographic story or essay, you will know the delight of creative alchemy, of making a gem out of life’s dross. (p16)
8. Writing the Natural Way: Using Right-Brain Techniques to Release your Expressive Powers – Gabriele Lusser Rico
You might know of Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. This is the writing equivalent of that book and focuses on using right-brain techniques to release creativity in writing. Published in 1983 and structured in a course-based way, the strategies are a useful addition to your creative tool-kit. Practices include: clustering, recurrent, re-vision, image and metaphor, creative tension and language rhythm. With insights on how the brain works throughout, it’s a great book for inspiring confidence in new-found ways especially if your left-brain critic is a very loud and powerful force.
Just as two heads are better than one for solving problems, so two brains are better than one when it comes to writing naturally.
9. The Successful Author Mindset: A Handbook for Surviving the Writer’s Journey – Joanna Penn
Joanna Penn’s The Successful Author Mindset focuses on mindset and the long-haul creative journey of being a writer. Writing is a lonely journey with self-doubt and your inner critic ever-present in shifting ways. This books covers the landscape of mindset issues writers encounter. It offers suggestions for recognising and tackling these issues, based on Joanna’s years of experience. Including excerpts from Joanna’s diary over her years of writing and self-publishing, it focuses on the emotional journey of being a writer. It’s about creativity for the longer term and riding the emotions over time.
Embrace self-doubt as part of the creative process. Be encouraged by the face that virtually all other creatives, including your writing heroes, feel it too with every book they write.
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You might also enjoy:
How to read for more creativity, pleasure and productivity
How to know and honour your special creative influences
Honour you lineage by Sage Cohen – from ‘Fierce on the Page‘
Creative practices in my toolkit to make the most of this year’s energies
Words to inspire from Steven Pressfield’s The Artist’s Journey
Work in progress – being one and creating one
