The three best books on writing I’ve ever read
From scholarsandrogues.comThere’s a lot of advice out there that’s by writers, for writers. Sadly, the majority of it is complete crap, and good only for a bit of self-motivation, or if you want to moan about how hard it is to write. Drivel like Pressfield’s The War of Art, which are basically glorified marketing tools that could be summarized into a single sentence and still be drivel.
And then you have these books – solid, timeless tools on the actual craft of writing.
On Writing Well: the classic guide to writing nonfiction by William Zinsser
“Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.”
William Zinsser is the literary equivalent of the battle-hardened general. A journalist since 1946, Zinsser wrote 19 books, ranging from travel to jazz to sport to the craft of writing. During the 70’s, he taught at Yale, where he was master of Branford. He even wrote a blog in 2010.
On Writing Well is his masterpiece. It covers everything – from fuzziness in language to sentence construction to the bigger brickwork of laying out ideas – and this is proper, in-the-trenches stuff told in the form of a series of stories and anecdotes and lessons delivered with marvelous readability. He advocates clean, minimal writing, taking apart political speeches, New York Times bestsellers, his own classes – this is a book and a writer who’s shaped three generations of authors and editors, and it’s unsurpassed as a book on the craft.
Stein On Writing by Sol Stein
“Be sure you don’t stop the story while describing. You are a storyteller, not an interior decorator.”
There are two opinions about this book. A) Stein is a pompous ass and B) Stein might just have written one of the best books on editing.
Both are true. Sol Stein, a man from the 1930s, wrote 13 books and edited some of the greatest novelists of their times – Bertram Wolfe, Elia Kazan, Lionel Trilling, W.H. Auden, George Orwell and so on. His publishing company, Stein and Day, published over 400 works, including stuff by Marilyn Monroe, Che Guevara, George Bernard Shaw, Maxim Gorky – Stein’s Wikipedia page basically reads like a who’s who of the 20th Century.
And while Stein on Writing is a railing, angry, raving book, full of self-references and preening, I’d say that’s justified. The book is worth its weight in gold.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
I watched an interview where George RR Martin asks the famously prolific King: “How the f— do you write so many books so fast? I think, ‘Oh, I’ve had a really good six months — I’ve written three chapters!’ and you’ve finished three books in that time.”
In On Writing, King lays out the answer. This, more than craft, is a book about the work ethic of a writer, and an object lesson on what it takes to be a King in your genre. It’s a validation book, but it’s pretty much the best validation book out there.
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