One Writer's Bookshelf

This list contains my collection (and some of the Boston, Leeds, Calgary and Ottawa public libraries') of books about writing and writers. The all have different niches in the ecology. I make no claims to comprehensiveness or absence of bias - my interests tend towards novels, science fiction and writing by women, and I am also attracted to information about writers early in their professional career, like myself. But if you think I've missed a good'un, please write and let me know.

Chicken soup

Writing down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg.
Wild Mind, Natalie Goldberg.
Two books with the fundamental (comforting ... terrifying) message that to be a writer, all you must do is keep a pen moving over a page. Natalie Goldberg practices writing the way she practices Zen, as a lifelong discipline and meditation. There will be moments of perfection and long spells of utter floundering, but what matters is the ongoing practice. The first book I recommend to people who have an intense desire to write, but have yet to discover what it is they have to say. By writing, Goldberg says, you will learn what moves, excites and preoccupies you.

Marching orders

Get that Novel Started! (And Keep it Going 'Til You Finish) Donna Levin, Writer's Digest Books, 1992.
Get that Novel Written! From initial idea to final edit. Donna Levin, Writer's Digest Books, 1996.
Two books that get down and dirty on the practicalities and realities of writing a novel. The first almost had me believing that you could get started on ten minutes a day (and a pet peeve of mine is people who insist you can write a novel in tiny scraps of time, if you Really Want To) - because she didn't end there. Ten minutes was merely the thin edge of a wedge, designed to start forcing all the other stuff aside. Under this section, I am inclined also to recommend -
Clutter's Last Stand. Don Aslett.
Which has nowt t'do wi' writing (as they say in Yorkshire) but everything to do with clearing the dross out of your life to allow time, space and energy for writing. I've probably read a dozen books on getting organized, but they all involved lists and systems and tickler files and diaries, and were far too complicated for me (all the organizing genes in our family went to my sister). Aslett's message is very simple - organization by elimination!
The Creative Woman's Getting-It-All-Together At Home Handbook. Jean Ray Laury. Hot Fudge Press, 1985.
Written by a fiber artist, from her own experience and the experience of other fiber artists, but I would say it's applicable to any woman - or any one - doing creative work in a family home, and having to carve out space and time despite the needs, wishes and sometimes outright interference of partner, children and other family members.

The Craft Itself

Teach Yourself Books. Creative Writing. Victor Jones. Hodder and Stoughton, UK, 1974.
Short and unassuming ('I entirely agree that to suggest a book on Creative Writing can create a creative writer is equivalent to suggesting that a book on divinity can create a god.'), unexpectedly good on the essentials, and illustrated in detail with examples from the classics.
Writing with Power. Peter Elbow. Oxford University Press.
How to turn the unwitting into literary editors. Several chapters are dedicated to how to obtain and use feedback, including lists of directive questions to give guidance to readers inexperienced in saying more than 'I really liked it,' or (with foot shuffling) 'Well, I know I said I'd read it, but I didn't have time ...' (Do I need to translate what this kind soul is saying?)
Taking Reality by Surprise. Susan Sellars, ed, 1991
Could also fit under Marching Orders, because it contains a wealth of exercises and prescriptions for practicing the craft, both alone and in company.
A Career in Crime: Inside information from leading women writers Helen Windrath, 1999. (UK edition.)
Women write about the craft of writing mystery.
Instead of Full Stops Susan Sellers, ed, 1996
On how to nurture a non-fiction book from idea, through proposal, submission, writing, reference and permissions gathering and publication.
The Complete Book of Scriptwriting J. Michael Straczynski, 1996.
Big, fat book on how to write TV, film and even radio scripts, from the man responsible for the most effective one hour television episodes I've ever seen, not to mention two of the best TV SF multi episode sagas. (Why two? Because I think that without the impetus of Babylon 5, the writers and producers of Deep Space Nine might well have trundled along in the episodic rut throughout, instead of producing the dazzling epics of the later seasons). And JMS can not only write scripts that work, he can explain how to write scripts that work.

The Joy of Words

Starting from Scratch. A Different Kind of Writer's Manual. Rita Mae Brown. Bantam, 1988.
Could also belong under the previous headings, since it contains robust and candid advice on the writing life. I took particular pleasure in the entertaining discussions of the forked root of the English language, language, class and character, the lost subjunctive tense and the iniquities of the passive voice. I had my primary education in the sixties, when grammar was OUT, and I more or less had to absorb the structure of language through my pores. To this day, I don't know why I do some of the things I do. And, of course, I came up through science, in which the passive is obligatory. I need periodic reinnocculations against the infection.
Playwriting. How to Write for the Theatre. Bernard Grebanier. Barnes and Noble, 1979.
Much of my appreciation of dialogue came from Grebanier, who describes the way playwrites use vocabulary, metaphor and speech rhythms in conveying character and emotion.
Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, Revised Edition, 1959.
Yes, I have a modern dictionary, full of the latest jargon. But my true love is this edition that predates computers, -isms and anagramitis, and contains delectable archaisms to be enjoyed but probably never employed in print.
The Reverse Dictionary. Readers Digest, 1989.
This is the book that will tell you the name of the little doohickey on the tip of a shoelace, what the first mate has to bellow when he wants the sails run out (and what a galleon is, for that matter), and what to call that funny shaped window high in the hall. For seekers of le mot juste (or failing that, the correct technical term).
The Describer's Dictionary. David Grambs. 1993
A combination thesaurus and chocolate box of literary description. Under a series of categories - things, landscape, animals and people - lists of descriptive terms face examples of what can be done with these words, in the proper hands.

Windows on Creation

Delighting the Heart. A Notebook for women writers. Susan Sellars, ed. The Women's Press, London.
A scrapbook arranged according to stages of creation, with short entries from women writers (of all ages and experience) describing their particular approach.
Working It Out. Sarah Ruddick and Pamela Daniels, eds. Pantheon Books, 1977.
A book very important to me when I discovered it, and one I still regard as one of the classic explorations of women and creative/academic work. Aside from the accounts by writers, there are accounts by artists and scientists of the way they think and work: useful if you plan to portray a character working at a separate discipline.
Writers Writing. Jenny Brown and Shona Munro, eds. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London, 1993.
A collection by participants in the Edinburgh Book Festival, covering First Attempts, Into Print, In Spite of ... etc. Entertaining and illuminating.
A Voice of One's Own. Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. The University Press of Kentucky, 1990.
Short essays based on interviews with American women writers talking about how they came to write, why they write what they write, and how a particular work came to be.
Writing Lives. Conversations between Women Writers. Mary Chamberlain, ed. Virago, 1988.
Conversations between well-known writers and their younger contemporaries, on all aspects of the craft and life.
Notebooks of the Mind. Explorations of Thinking. Vera John Steiner, Harper and Row, 1985.
Tracing the creativity in all forms of the arts and in science through the notebooks kept by their practioners.
The Writer's Notebook Howard Junker, ed. HarperCollins West 1995.
An anthology of writers' workbooks, reproduced in facimile - single word jottings, illegible scribbles, oblique diagrams, hand written notes, typed journal entries - artefacts of the early stages of work from such writers as Dorothy Allison, Ethan Canin, Po Bronson, Maxine Hong Kingston.
Over the years I have read just about every writer's notebook or journal I could lay hands on. I particularly remember the single line gems in F.Scott Fitzgerald's, the lucid prose of John Cheever's (I wish I could write that clearly in zero draft), the intensity and sometime painful obsessiveness of Sylvia Plath's, Beverley Farmer's narrative of a spritual quest undertaken in search of a new direction to her life and work (A Body of Water), David Gascoyne's journal of his years in Paris in the thirties and the excerpts anthologized in the Antaeus volume of Journals, Notebooks and Diaries, 1988.

Science Fiction

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer's Sourcebook, 1996. Writer's Digest Books.
A general market reference, with detailed entries from the major markets and short entries for minor ones, with a section of essays from recently published writers and their editors and agents on how that particular book came to be published.
World-Building. A writer's guide to constructing star systems and life-supporting planets. Writer's Digest Books, 1996.
Aliens and Alien Societies. A writer's guide to creating extraterrestrial life-forms. Writer's Digest Books, 1995.
The first two in the Science Fiction Writing Series, edited by Ben Bova, and surveying the basics of the physical and biological sciences as applied to the writing of science fiction.

Chillers

Silences. Tillie Olsen. 1978.
Unnerving reading for any writer: a scrapbook essay of the myriad ways in which creativity can be stifled (born of the wrong sex, the wrong race, the wrong class; into the wrong age, the wrong circumstances, the wrong family ...) Olsen herself is a gifted writer who for twenty years worked outside the home as well as within raising four children. Those twenty years were years of silence.
How To Suppress Women's Writing. Joanna Russ. 1983.
She didn't write it. She wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it but she wrote only one of it. She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, but it isn't really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. She wrote it, BUT ... All the ways that women's writing has been disparaged and discounted by the literary establishment.

Writer's Bookshelf created May, 1997. Last updated, June 17, 2001. Restyled September 20, 2008. Alison Sinclair.