The best creative writing books

One of the conundrums that writers in the memoir genre encounter is the balancing act related to sharing family stories while addressing concerns and nuances about privacy.

Kerry Cohen’s The Truth of Memoir provides pointed advice about truthful storytellers, while also being considerate of multiple, familial viewpoints. Cohen reminds authors of the importance of thoughtfully assessing the motivation to write, cautioning those who may feel compelled to write in order to seek revenge, particularly when writing about family members.

Romance is all about feelings. The highs. The lows. The dejection and the joys. But you need to “show” and not “tell” how your characters are feeling.

To do that, you use gestures, dialogue, facial expressions, internal sensations, and thoughts. The Emotion Thesaurus provides all that and more. There are more than 130 entries to help writers show emotion. This is a fantastic book for all novel genres. If I could only keep one reference book (other than mine), this would be it!

All game designers struggle with what it means to be creative, and whether they are doing it properly. What It Is and its companion book, Picture This are very personal guides to what it means to be a creative person, and are full of inspirational stories and very practical tips to create your best work and not get in your own way. 

Nothing says humanity like vulnerability about the messy, imperfect creatures we are, and this book has that in spades. (Or I guess, more appropriately, hearts.) I could talk about how the book is darkly funny and reveals hidden depths of the soul, but I'll admit one thing I love about it is that it contains one of the most beautiful, inspiring poems I've ever heard, one I share frequently, with some devastating lines and a real sense of hope that it's okay to feel broken and still fight on, and the poem is titled, “I Can't Believe I Let You Touch My Balls”.  It's like if that old piano player joke was real life.

Gutkind founded the journal Creative Nonfiction and has been a tireless advocate of the CNF genre for decades, as a writer, teacher, public speaker, and publisher. His nuts and bolts guidebook, You Can't Make This Stuff Up, offers a wide-ranging examination of the craft of writing true stories – dialogue, description, beginnings, endings, intimate detail, reflection, point-of-view, framing – as well as clear and helpful chapters about forming a writing habit and learning to live one’s life as a writer. Gutkind has generously packed decades of wisdom and knowledge into perhaps the most comprehensive nonfiction guide available.

Le Guin is a star in fiction’s firmament but in this book she’s also a wonderfully modest practitioner of the art of writing. She discusses the sound of your prose, naming characters, repetition, and point of view. I found her chapter on crowding and leaping especially helpful. Crowding is when you follow Keats’ advice to load every rift with ore; leaping is when you skillfully leave things out—two invaluable skills in fiction, and in life.  

Do not come to this book in search of warm hugs about the beauty of the process. True to the title, Klinkenborg (best name ever?) offsets each of his sentences like an epic poem in verse. The epic he describes is how epically bad your writing is, and—hopefully—how to improve. He returns to the word "notice" over and over, and that's really it. You're blowing sentences by not noticing what the sentence itself is doing. You're over-emphasizing "meaning" at the expense of the vehicle that delivers it. I sense there's a kind man in there, somewhere, who's working a side of the street he feels has been neglected by years of misguided education. But here, he's dedicated to the larger cause of clean, clear sentences. Not hugs.

I’ve been a huge fan of Swapna and Sheena’s since I first read Dave Pigeon, which is so good it’s now a set text on the Creative Writing degree I teach. These two are champions of slapstick, silliness, and subversive creatures with big hearts. And Bad Panda is, arguably, their greatest creation. She’s SO desperate to be bad, but she is scuppered at every turn by the fact that everything she does looks so ridiculously cute. The result is panda-monium (groan!)

“Are you sick of being utterly adorable?
Tired of being cuddled and hugged?
Fed up of having your head confused for your bottom because you just so happen to be SOOOOPER-DOOOOOPER fluffy?
Lin: If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’re in the right book.”

I don’t read a lot of creative non-fiction, but I loved this one. It’s a collection of essays that recalls the best of Joan Didion or Tom Wolfe. Minutely observed, crisply written, and suffused with a wry humor, it’s as much fun as a good novel. And the first essay, toggling between the author’s experience as a medical actor (item 31 on the checklist for how medical students handle her supposed conditions: “Voiced empathy for my situation/problem”) and two real medical problems she faced, is all about empathy. Much of the rest of the book deals with empathy too, at least indirectly: in James Agee’s photographs, and in the way Jamison herself enters into the worldviews of drug dealers, extreme marathoners, and participants in a medical cult. But the first essay is squarely on the topic, and it’s fabulous.

No Other Life combines three of Gary Young’s books into one volume. There is such unique style and quiet beauty to Young’s work. I am truly inspired by it. He has a knack for capturing the extraordinary in the mundane in brief but deep prose poems that grip the soul. 

Young was one of my professors in college and was a driving force for why I pursued a creative writing degree and chose to continue to write after graduating. His work will always hold a special place in my nature-loving creative heart.

Even if you don’t want to be a poet, there’s something about playing with poetic form that I think is useful to any writer because it enables you to explore the use of rhythm, metaphor, simile and other ways of honing your consciousness into literary and written form. It demands specificity of description and uniqueness of voice, and Kate Clanchy’s book - she is herself a published poet, writer but also a teacher - gets to the nub of it through examples and exercise, to emerge a more fluent and confident writer, and in whichever form you choose.

Many of us are a bit afraid of stepping out and trying something new. That applies especially with creative work. “I’m just not that good,” we tell ourselves—or voices from our past tell us. Brenda Ueland was a long-time Chicago creative writing instructor, and her little book is strong encouragement (and a bit of a kick in the pants) about risk-taking and learning about our super-powers in the process.

Although I’m a Brit, I joined the Mystery Writers of America early in my career and benefited enormously from the friendships I made. This newly published volume is a virtual encyclopedia of the advice their experts are willing to share. With more than seventy contributors, it covers the field and more, including mysteries for children, graphic novels, and true crime. None of it is treated as gospel. I laughed out loud when I found the chapter "Always Outline" by Jeffery Deaver, followed by "Never Outline" by Lee Child. Even the follow-up process of reaching out to readers is explained in "Building Your Community" by Louise Penny. This is a must-visit workshop for anyone serious about the craft.

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.

Traumatized at the age of eight, causing him to be mute for ten years, Michael has a talent. He can pick any lock, no matter how complicated, and that includes safes. You can see where I’m going with this, right? It doesn’t take long to find out where that questionable talent leads him, because he’s just been released from a ten-year stint in prison. Michael is a heartbreaking character who is unwittingly led down the wrong path. The author unfolds the story through Michael’s narrative, slipping back and forth in time to explain how he got where he is, culminating in the tragic moment that sent Michael into his world of silence. The story is original and creative in character delineation and suspense.

Now in its tenth edition, this book is for committed writers only. A highly valuable textbook on the writing process, Burroway covers story form, plot, structure, building character, place, and setting, and takes a detailed look at point of view. Each section comes with examples of how things do and do not work, as well as providing a list of suggested readings and writing prompts for further study. This book is a master class in creative writing that also calls on us to renew our love of storytelling and to celebrate the skill of writing well.

I picked up this book as the title sounded interesting, but it sat on my bookshelves for over five years before I delved into it. Since then, it’s become one of my favourite guides to writing. It’s described as ‘probably the most unusual guidebook for creative writing in the world.’ It’s full of insights such as ‘grammar is a mapping of the human soul,’ or ‘the social word… is serious play.’ The play takes place in a field with the four ‘great human virtues’ at its corners: beauty, good will, truth, and openness. It’s a ‘sourcebook of spells’ that have the power to ‘carry you into that place of the heart from which true language comes.’

Writing professor Gabriele Rico knows how to take the fear out of writing, which is why this book became such a powerful best-seller and why I love to read and recommend it. Among the many strategies and techniques she offers in Writing the Natural Way, one of my favorites is her brainstorming strategy called clustering, which gives us permission to wander and bypass the critical censorship we are often hindered by. In turn, this fuels creativity and prompts us to make associations among ideas, memories, and feelings that are otherwise seemingly diverse or disorganized. She also firmly believes that, although writing can be a painful process, it’s not what hurts us that matters but rather it’s how we deal with the pain, and it’s through an honest expression of our truth that we can grow and heal.

Master teacher David Mura’s A Stranger's Journey addresses long-overlooked issues of race and identity in publishing and in the standard teaching of creative writing and he brilliantly advocates for a more inclusive and expansive definition of writing craft. Though this book is partly aimed at educators, he offers incredibly useful craft lessons as well, primarily through his deft analysis of work done by writers ranging from James Baldwin to Mary Karr to ZZ Packer. In a world that no longer accepts the notion that our greatest authors have to be “dead white men,” Mura offers a necessary window into the intersection of race, literature, and culture.

While The Swallows deals with an unsettling subject matter, Lutz tells the story with a light-hearted voice and bits of humor which made reading this book an enjoyable experience for me.

The novel follows the teachers and students at an elite boarding school where a secret club of male students subject the girls to an upsetting sexual contest.

Previous attempts to disband or expose this club in the school’s past have been unsuccessful which makes our two main characters, rebellious student, Gemma and creative writing teacher, Alex even more determined to stop the sexual harassment and coercion of female students.

Both Gemma and Alex make some mistakes and morally questionable choices in their pursuit of the truth but they show relentless grit and determination in the name of justice.