My favorite books on writing fiction

I sold three novels before I found this book, and it transformed how I think about writing. If you want to write stories that grab your readers by the throat and makes them want more, this is the book for you.  Swain’s basic premise is simple: fiction is movement, action, and reaction. He deduces from this specific, actionable ways to construct compelling sentences that turn movement to action, action to scenes, and scenes to stories. Swain’s influence on screenwriting is everywhere, from The Rockford Files to The Mandalorian. His influence on contemporary fiction is just as pervasive. His ideas about “motivation reaction units” and “scenes/sequel pairs” are now in many “how-to” books, but no one describes them better than the man who invented them.   

I first encountered Joseph Campbell through a series of PBS interviews with Bill Moyers. His insights about myths, modern and ancient, reveal truths about human nature, love, life, and death that changed my life. With this book, he reveals common threads to heroic myths from many ages and cultures. The book outlines universal elements and describes why and how these elements resonate just as much today as they did thousands of years ago. George Lucas used Campbell’s ideas in writing Star Wars. For authors, the hero’s journey gives a detailed blueprint for epic sagas, no matter what the genre. The hero’s journey resonates because it’s life’s journey, filled with hope and despair, success and failure, love, life, and ultimately death. It resonates because it’s everyone’s journey. 

I’m a mathematician. Mathematicians start with basic ideas—axioms and definitions—and use logic to deduce magical things called theorems. When I decided I wanted to write fiction, I looked for books on writing. I found lots of good books, but they left my mathematical brain unsatisfied. Then I found Gardner’s book. Gardner’s genius is that he provides a theory of fiction, a framework for understanding what makes writing come alive. Reading Gardner, I saw at once the difference between, say, Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. They’re both geniuses, to be sure, but King’s writing draws you into his fictional worlds in ways Poe’s never does. The underlying theory, the fictional dream, makes all the difference. The fictional dream is the secret to compelling writing.

When I write, I use many different tools. For example, every author needs a good dictionary, a thesaurus, and the Chicago Manual of Style. I consult places like the APA Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to get personality traits right and take notes when watching movies to see how actors portray emotions. When I saw this title, I knew I had to have it. Like any thesaurus, it cross-references different emotions, but it does much more. It gives body language, intonation, and thoughts that accompany an emotion. It makes suggestions for dialogue and visceral responses. It provides multiple ways for an author to show what’s going on in a character’s head and heart, without telling. Most importantly, like any thesaurus, it helps writers avoid repeating themselves and thus add variety and vigor. 

I love both science fiction and mysteries, so naturally I’ve written novels that combine the two. I know enough science to realize how annoying it is when an author gets a simple thing wrong, like confusing a measure of distance (ahem, a parsec) with a unit of time. When I needed to write about a detective investigating a crime scene, I knew I needed better background than watching Lenny on Law and Order. That’s where this book comes in. Wingate is a former cop and CSI investigator in addition to having a PhD in English, and provides detailed and practical notes, drawn from personal experience, on the scene of the crime. Besides pointing out an excellent reference, the point of this recommendation is to do the research and get the details right no matter the genre.