The best novels to make you a better writer

This book is the book that made me decide to become an author. I was always a voracious reader and crazy about all things technological—space exploration, airplanes, naval warfare, you name it. In my mind, there was no way anyone would want to read a book about my interests—until Tom Clancy showed it absolutely could be done and singlehandedly created a new genre of fiction with one book.

His research was so accurate that he was accused of spilling classified information about our submarine capabilities and tactics. But no, he was just an insurance agent from Owings, Maryland, who touched a 220-volt wire in my soul that made me decide, “Someday I’m going to do that, too!”

When I first began writing, the most common critique I got was, “You haven’t found your voice yet.” My editor said my style reminded her of Dean Koontz and gave me this book.

I was hooked from the first rain-soaked scene, where protagonist Spencer Grant checks on a missing friend and stumbles into a rogue government hit squad. Fortunately, Spencer Grant has a robust skill set of his own, along with a very dark secret in his past, his personal “dark river of the heart.”

The book goes a bit wild near the end, but by then, the lap bar is firmly down, and there is no getting off the ride. When I finished it, I declared, “I want to write just like that!”

I like to write “big” books not just in length, but in high concept and complexity.

While struggling with my first book, my editor recommended this one by Michael Crichton. In this book, a derelict spaceship is discovered at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and a group of scientists are sent down to investigate Earth’s first solid proof of extraterrestrial life. Their encounter quickly becomes a struggle for survival, and when a typhoon drives off the support vessels on the surface, they are on their own.

Sphere taught me a skilled author can make even the most outlandish plot compelling, and those tools helped me finish my first book.

With three novels under my belt, I had time to read for leisure again. Unfortunately, most of what I read was crap. Infuriating, “How did this author get published” crap. Then I found this, the first book of the excellent Frontlines series.

What a joy to be utterly swept up into Earth’s future of early interstellar exploration and to be completely convinced the protagonist will die in the next scene, no matter how many books there are in the series. Kloos’ style differs greatly from mine, with sparse descriptions that provide just enough to launch the imagination without weighing down the prose. In Terms of Enlistment, I learned that sometimes, less is very much more.

When The Expanse series hit television, a literary ripple spread through my reading circles; “Oh, if you think the TV show is good, you gotta read the books!” From the opening scene of Julie Mao hiding in a locker of a spaceship as her friends are tossed out the airlock by pirates, this book throws the reader into a fully formed universe of our solar system in the near future. 

As an author, I am very hardened to weak MacGuffins, the central plot device around which the narrative turns. When I unraveled the MacGuffin of Leviathan Wakes, I wanted to fall down and chant, “I am not worthy!” It really was genius. It permanently raised my standards as an author.