An author who I coached on a novel asked me a delicious question. This seaman was a blue water sailor, the sort that takes a sailboat out over vast stretches of ocean. Weeks of time in the cabin, or on deck. He asked what books would I recommend to a fiction writer, one who’s setting sail for a cruise around the Pacific.
There are so many on my shelves here, and on my Kindle as well. Collected, curated and used over the last 22 years, these are the baker’s dozen-plus I’d grab if my boat was leaving the slip. The list with links lives on this page.
- Wired for Story, by Lisa Cron. This one book shows you how stories capture us on a elemental level. Written by a Hollywood screen doctor, the book makes everything else about writing easier. Cron has a two-hour video course on LinkedIn Learning, but the book is the most tabbed and underlined paperback I own and use.
- The Making of a Story, by Alice LaPlante. More than 600 pages covering every aspect. About 150 of them are writing, top-notch. Exercises in each chapter, too.
- Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction. Get it in paper. Worth every glorious page.
- Scene and Structure, by Jack Bickham. How to flow between scene and sequel.
- Showing & Telling, by Laurie Alberts. Finally gives Telling its due in creating a story
- The Scene Book, by Sandra Scofield. Everything you want to know about making compelling scenes.
- The First Five Pages, by Noah Lukeman. Crafting an opening to a book that agents want to pick up.
- Story, by Robert McKee. A brilliant 400 pages on story structure, with movies as examples. Get the abridged audiobook as an companion.
- The Writer’s Journey, by Christopher Vogler. Joseph Campbell’s classic story archetypes (like The Mentor, The Gatekeeper) illustrated with examples from movie stories.
- Writing the Breakout Novel, by Donald Maas. The master of making tension on every page. Has a dandy workbook as a companion novel, too
- Characters and Viewpoint, by Orson Scott Card. Sci-Fi master has a great style while showing the way to start a character.
- What Would Your Character Do? by Eric Maisel and Ann Maisel. Psychologist to artists (and my creativity coaching trainer), writing with his wife, offers great personality quizzes for your characters.
- The Novelist’s Notebook, by Laurie Henry. (Another one you should buy in paper.) This one is special, a book with essential questions and rules you establish to explore for your novel. You write upon the pages of this hardback book, the size of a nice journal. I used one of these for my novel Viral Times, and another for this year’s Sins of Liberty. A place to store ideas and get concepts for meta-writing — the scaffolding of your book’s structure.
- Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, by Roy Peter Clark. Great instruction on making anything more clear and compelling. Branch to the right, to put the noun+verb combo as close to the sentence’s start as possible, for example.
- The Secrets of Story, by Matt Bird. So much detail and nuance in this book, essential for good fiction. “Your audience need not always sympathize with your hero, but they must always empathize with them.”
If you want to write, you have to make time to read, and that is also true about craft books and guides. Tell me in the comments about your go-to books to make your writing sail faster onto the page.
