The best books about learning to write

Carl Vigeland Author Of October Calf
By Carl Vigeland

Who am I?

The author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of magazine and newspaper pieces, I taught writing for many years as a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. My passion for learning to write is lifelong, beginning in a musical childhood that led me from notes to words. A voracious reader, I set my ambition early-on to create stories that worked like the music I love, articulated most fully in recent books that take off from the many years I spent traveling with the iconic jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, with whom I also collaborated on Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life. My focus in both learning and doing is the intersection of memory and experience in a process that is ongoing in the intertwining of life and work.

I wrote...

October Calf

By Archibald MacLeish, Carl Vigeland,

Book cover of October Calf

What is my book about?

Accidental neighbors half a century ago, a young writer and an old poet begin a correspondence that continues through the last decade of the poet’s life and echoes years later in the memory and short stories of his final student. Beginning with a portrait of the poet and the western Massachusetts hilltown where he and the young would-be author lived, October Calf crosses practical advice with wisdom and offers as well many suggestions for other reading.

The book reaches its dramatic climax with the eponymous title story--the subject of several of the poet’s letters and the product of numerous revisions—and closes with a single, short evocation set in the present and called “Covid Blues.”

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The books I picked & why

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

By J.D. Salinger,

Book cover of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Why did I love this book?

One of four novella-length stories the legendary author of Catcher in the Rye published, this so-called introduction of the fictional author’s older, fictional brother—a literary conceit, as the portrait never gets past Seymour’s face—includes a long letter, ostensibly written by Seymour to his author-brother Buddy, which encompasses the best advice about writing that I know. "Were most of your stars out?" Seymour asks rhetorically...no, not asks...pleads.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

By J.D. Salinger,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Note from the Author: The two long pieces in this book originally came out in The New Yorker - RAISE HIGH THE ROOF BEAM, CARPENTERS in 1955, SEYMOUR - An Introduction in 1959. Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my series about the Glass family. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

'The Glasses are…

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A Moveable Feast

By Ernest Hemingway,

Book cover of A Moveable Feast

Why did I love this book?

Much, though not all, of the book becomes the very feeling Hemingway describes, but the chapter, "Hunger Was Good Discipline," especially takes flight in its evocation of craft and creation, closing with a reference to Hemingway’s greatest short story, “Big Two-Hearted River” (Part I and Part II). It is as if we are reading the actual experience of writing the story…no, not reading, experiencing!

A Moveable Feast

By Ernest Hemingway,

Why should I read it?

12 authors picked A Moveable Feast as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

Featuring a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this new edition also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son Jack and…

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Death in the Afternoon

By Ernest Hemingway,

Book cover of Death in the Afternoon

Why did I love this book?

Officially a book about bullfighting, with so many digressions that they become the book, the finest such sections delve deeply into the art and practice of writing, most extraordinarily in the thrilling, moving final pages. It is also in this great book that for the first time in print Hemingway articulates his principle that you can leave something out of what you are writing if you know you are leaving it out.

Death in the Afternoon

By Ernest Hemingway,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Death in the Afternoon as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Ernest Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting.

'I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things, and one of the simplest things of all and the most fundamental is violent death'

This is Hemingway's classic portrait of the pageantry of bullfighting. Here are the sights, the sounds, the excitement, and above all, the knowledge, that fuelled Hemingway's passion for Spain and the bullfight. This remarkable book contains some of his finest writing, inspired by the intense life, as well as the inevitable death, of those hot, violent afternoons.

'Hemingway's style, at its best, is a…

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Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1

By Marcel Proust, CK Scott Moncrieff (translator),

Book cover of Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1

Why did I love this book?

Where to begin? Proust’s gigantic masterpiece is the proverbial gift that keeps giving, none more so than in its explication and then repeated “demonstration” of the very thing it describes, the sensory triggers of what Proust calls involuntary memory but that here become the emotional propulsion for this book about writing the very beautiful book (or books—it comes in six volumes) you are reading.

Swann's Way: In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 1

By Marcel Proust, CK Scott Moncrieff (translator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Swann's Way as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In Search of Lost Time —also translated as Remembrance of Things Past—is a novel in seven volumes, written by Marcel Proust.

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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

By Stephen King,

Book cover of On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Why did I love this book?

Though not a fan of his fiction, I recommend this “how-to” that King wrote after a near-death car accident for its entertaining, cogent advice. Beyond the numerous pieces of helpful, “nuts and bolts” guidance, the book also becomes an example of the very narrative the storyteller is teaching a writer how to do.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

By Stephen King,

Why should I read it?

18 authors picked On Writing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twentieth Anniversary Edition with Contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King

ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S TOP 100 NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.

“Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the…

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