Three Craft Books Every Writer Should Read
If you’re looking to hone your writing skills and dive deeper into craft, here are three books you should pick up from your local bookstore or library.
Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
Shapiro’s book centers around the challenges, habits, and mindset needed to keep writing through the good, the bad, and the ugly. Drawing from her own experience, Shapiro offers practical advice for debut authors trying to break onto the literary scene, as well as those who have been writing and publishing for quite some time. Writing takes guts. It requires patience. But above all, it demands hard work and a relentless mindset.
I read this book about five years ago and the chapter about writing for an “audience of one” is, to this day, one of the biggest things that pushes me to generate work as much work as I possibly can. My audience of one gives me the freedom to take risks, to let my imagination run wild, and to write without the fear that my work will never be read. If my writings never amount to anything, if they are doomed to do nothing but collect dust and yellow in a trunk in my attic, it will still all be worth it. Because I know that even if no one else appreciates my work, I know my audience of one will.
Thrill Me by Benjamin Percy
In case you haven’t noticed yet, I am a big Ben Percy fan. The man is… well, the man. He has an incredible knack for taking what I admire the most about genre and literary fiction and smashing them together. But what I like even more is how he addresses the ongoing literary vs. genre debate. While some believe literary and genre fiction are mutually exclusive, Percy believes that to write great stories you need elements from both camps to thrill readers. Throughout Thrill Me, Percy turns to some of the most iconic storytellers of our time to dissect how they use elements such as plot, character, dialogue, and suspense to engage readers. Percy highlights examples from the likes of Stephen King, Lauren Groff, Tim O’Brien, George R. R. Martin, and many, many more. He even discusses various films. Through this essay collection, Percy offers practical craft advice and proves that to be a master storyteller you need to consume and study as many stories as you can get your hands on.
I often find that my work lives somewhere between literary and genre, and so this book was refreshing to read. It doesn’t advocate for one or the other. It objectively looks at what it takes to craft a story and then take that story to the next level. Not only did it offer me new ways to think about building my worlds, developing my characters, and depicting my scenes, but it also gave me the confidence to continue to straddle these two spheres.
Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenbrog
When you’re in the midst of writing or developmental editing, it is easy to get consumed by the “big picture.” But at some point, you’ll need to shift your attention to the sentences on the page and ask yourself: Is this sentence communicating what I want it to? Several short sentences about writing provides countless starting points to help get you thinking about the words you have on the page. But more importantly, it challenges you to become more in-tune you’re your speech patterns and narrative tendencies that you may not have noticed if you just focus on the big picture.
This is the book that helped me find my authorial voice. When you first begin to write, I think all of us mimic the authors we admire or the stories we hold near and dear. But while you can learn a lot from mimicking, at some point there needs to be a transition where your style evolves into something completely your own. What that thing is… well, it depends because we all process the world in different ways. Not only do we observe with our senses, but we also perceive it based on previous experiences, our values, our cultures, genders, races, etc. All these things that make us who we are dictate how we absorb and process information. Being aware of how you digest information and articulate it will ultimately help you come into your own voice, which all comes out on the sentence level. It dictates our word choices, our phrasing, the details we choose to harp, and more.
