How to Write
Dozens of “how to write” books are published every year. Here are a few that we have quoted or cited, and a few others that you might find encouraging and useful.
Aronie, Nancy Slonim. Writing from the Heart: Tapping the Power of Your Inner Voice. New York: Hyperion, 1998.
Atchity, Kenneth. A Writer’s Time: A Guide to the Creative Process from Vision through Revision. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. Atchity works through a schedule, an agenda, for writing a book, including time for vacations between drafts.
Ballenger, Bruce, and Barry Lane. Discovering the Writer Within: 40 Days to More Imaginative Writing. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1989. Full of imperatives: “Make a list of every person you’ve known.” Not a bad idea, as a jump start.
Boice, Robert. “Strategies for Enhancing Scholarly Productivity.” In Writing and Publishing for Academic Authors, edited by Joseph M. Moxley and Todd Taylor. 2nd ed. Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
Cox, Stephen. “How to Write History,” Annals of Iowa 49, nos. 3, 4 (Winter/Spring 1988): 261–67.
Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 1986. Zen approach. Writing as practice, i.e., developing a good habit. Choose a topic and write for ten minutes on that topic. Choose a time and write every day at that time for ten minutes. Also author of Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (New York: Bantam, 1990), about being a professional writer, and Living Color (New York: Bantam, 1997). Audios are available of her classes and talks.
Gray, Francine du Plessix. Comments on learning writing from the poet Charles Olson. Quoted in Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community, by Martin Duberman, 376 (New York: Dutton, 1972).
Hampl, Patricia. I Could Tell You Stories. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Biography as a literary form.
Kazin, Alfred. A Walker in the City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. A model recollection of a boyhood. Every American memoirist can profit from reading it before setting pen to paper or finger to keyboard.
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Scribner, 2000. A memoir, as the title says, that holds nuggets of advice for writers of nonfiction as well as fiction.
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Pantheon 1994. A much-beloved how-to-write book, itself a memoir, aimed toward writing professionally.
Larsen, Michael. How to Write a Book Proposal. 3rd ed. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2003.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland OR: Eighth Mountain Press, 1998. Grew out of classes taught by a swell writer.
Moxley, Joseph M. Publish, Don’t Perish: The Scholar’s Guide to Academic Writing and Publishing. Foreword by Robert Boice. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. A comprehensive how-to-write book, meant for university professors but full of useful tips for every beginning writer. The source of our six ways of outlining in our chapter titled “Getting Organized.”
New York Times, “Writers on Writing,” an occasional Monday morning newspaper feature. The whole run can be found on the Web at www.nytimes.com/arts. Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, Elmore Leonard, Kent Haruf, John Updike, E. L., Doctorow, Ed McBain, Annie Proulx, Jamaica Kincaid, and Saul Bellow have written pieces for this feature.
Sloane, William. The Craft of Writing, edited by Julia H. Sloane. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979.
Smith, Michael C., and Suzanne Greenberg. Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink: Everyday Creative Writing. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group 1999. Treats the insight, memory, sensations that things around your house can prompt. The stories that an archive of years of old canceled checks can tell. The odor, taste, and feel of iceberg lettuce. The memories and feelings that things trigger and that you can write from and about.
Stanek, Lou Willett. Writing Your Life: Putting Your Past on Paper. New York: Avon, 1996. Lots of exercises such as, “Write about the biggest bully you ever encountered.” Says that you learn to write by writing.
Strunk, William Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: Macmillan, 1979.
E. B. White was the editor of the New Yorker, which set the standard for American English writing in the 1930s. Through thick and thin, New Yorker style has scarcely wavered in the seventy years that the magazine has been published.
William Strunk Jr., of Cornell University, taught English to White and to hundreds of other students early in the twentieth century. Strunk called his manual “the little book.” In his edition, E. B. White introduced the foundation of his writing style to the wider world.
Stephen King observes that all you need to know about grammar you can get from Strunk and White and the endpapers of Warriner’s (see below).
Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit. New York: Putnam, 1938; reprint, Schubert Club of St. Paul, 1983; paperback, Minneapolis: Gray Wolf, n.d. An inspiring book that grew out of a writing class Ueland taught at the Minneapolis YWCA. It’s unpretentious, very practical, very direct, and it’s full of citations and quotations of Ueland’s own wide and deep reading. Ueland also wrote an autobiography simply entitled Me and another very spirited book about writing, Strength to Your Sword Arm.
Warriner, John E. English Composition Grammar: Complete Course. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988. Recently, though, Warriner seems to have written many editions of a Holt Handbook for Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. (For comment, see Strunk and White.)
Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Zinsser, William, ed. Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1998. Essays by well-known memoirists and writers Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson. The essays are gems, the authors’ bibliographies at the back of the book are treasure chests, and a person thinking of writing a memoir could do a heck of a lot worse than to spend a few weeks on the front porch reading the books they write about here—Conway’s The Road from Coorain, Kazin’s A Walker in the City, McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and (although they are novels, not memoirs) Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Beloved.
________. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: Harper and Row, 1980. A well-known book.