The Writer’s Portable Mentor, by Priscilla Long
The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life distills 20 years of teaching and creativity by the well-published author Priscilla Long. The Writer’s Portable Mentor helps writers understand and incorporate the regular practices of virtuoso creators; provides a guide to structuring literary, journalistic, or fictional pieces or entire books; opens the door to the sentence strategies of the masters; provides tools for developing a poet’s ear for use in prose; trains writers in the observation skills of visual artists; and guides them toward more effective approaches to getting their work into the world.
Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg
The beloved author of Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind, and Long Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg, has inspired a generation of writers with her insight, humor, and empathy. This writing book helps people break through writer’s block and inspires creativity. It is a must for all writers to read.
Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life
Natalie Goldberg, author of the bestselling Writing Down The Bones, teaches a method of writing that can take you beyond craft to the true source of creative power: The mind that is “raw, full of energy, alive and hungry.”
Here is compassionate, practical, and often humorous advice about how to find time to write, how to discover your personal style, how to make sentences come alive, and how to overcome procrastination and writer’s block — including more than thirty provocative “Try this” exercises to get your pen moving. Wild Mind will change your way of writing. It may also change your life.
The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr
From Publisher: In The Art of Memoir, master memoirist Mary Karr synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black-belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process as she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir.
The Pen and the Bell, by Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes
This beautiful book proposes that contemplation is an active practice that can take place anywhere, anytime–in the Volkswagen repair shop, at the Farmer’s Market, at PetSmart–Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes share experiences that have helped them bring mindfulness and new avenues of expression into their writing.
Each chapter of The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World includes suggested readings and activities, offering writers innovative ways to:
* create physical and mental space for contemplation and writing
* heighten awareness as a basis for writing
* use the ancient art of Lectio Divina (sacred reading)
* practice writing that articulates the concrete, tactile, sensory world
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'”
The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, by Frances Mayes
The bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun brings poetry out of the classroom and into the homes of everyday readers.
Before she fell in love with Tuscany, Frances Mayes fell in love with verse. After publishing five books of poetry and teaching creative writing for more than twenty-five years, Mayes is no stranger to the subject. In The Discovery of Poetry, an accessible “field guide” to reading and writing poetry, she shares her passion with readers. Beginning with basic terminology and techniques, from texture and sound to rhyme and repetition, Mayes shows how focusing on one aspect of a poem can help you to better understand, appreciate, and enjoy the reading and writing experience. In addition to many creative and helpful composition ideas, following each lyrical and lively discussion is a thoughtful selection of poems. With its wonderful anthology from Shakespeare to Jamaica Kinkaid, The Discovery of Poetry is an insightful, invaluable guide to what Mayes calls “the natural pleasures of language-a happiness we were born to have.”
Escaping Into the Open: The Art of Writing, by Elizabeth Berg
Product Description:
Elizabeth Berg touches women’s lives with heartbreakingly funny and true novels — including the New York Times bestseller Talk Before Sleep — that distinctly capture the essence of their lives. Now this critically acclaimed author and writing instructor offers an inspiring, practical handbook on the joys, challenges, and creative possibilities inherent in the writing life.
Both autobiography and primer, Escaping into the Open interweaves Elizabeth Berg’s story of her own journey from working mother to published novelist with encouraging advice on how to create stories that spring from deep within the heart.
In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier
Product Description: An exciting new anthology by the editors of the popular In Short, about which Publishers Weekly said: “Even readers skeptical of short-attention-span publishing will find these shorts addictive.” In their previous collection Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones coined the term “short” for those creative nonfiction pieces –literary rather than informational, and characteristically short –that are attracting our finest writers. Now, with a more introspective focus, this new collection emphasizes the personal as “a way of seeing the world, of expressing an interior life. It is intimate without being maudlin, it is private without being secret.” From Harriet Doerr’s recollection of a halcyon time to Josephine Jacobsen’s reverie on memory, In Brief offers vivid glimpses into the ways experience can be shaped in language that is fresh and inventive. The seventy-two authors here include the known –John McPhee, Cythia Ozick, James Salter –as well as remarkable new writers. Essays (all under 2000 words) range from Frank McCourt’s search for his father in the pubs of Limerick to William Maxwell’s thoughts about growing old; from Charles Baxter’s early experience of reading to Brady Udall’s confession as a liar. Patricia Hampl recalls meals at her grandmother’s house, while Jane Brox contemplates the meaning of bread. In each piece, imagination becomes a way to explore reality. The real world we are fortunate enough to live in is revealed as endlessly rich and deep.
On Writing, by Stephen King
Product Description: “Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the 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 trade every writer must-have. King’s advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 — and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it — fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.
Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew, by Ursula Le Guin
From Booklist: Le Guin, a well-known science fiction writer who also has a reputation for excellence as a writers’ group leader, has put down on paper what she instinctively knows about the craft of writing and what she has learned from teaching it. The result is this instructive, supportive guide for writers who desire to be a productive member of a criticism group or want to pursue their art alone. Concerning the latter situation, Le Guin makes an important point: “Group criticism is excellent training for self-criticism, but until quite recently no writer[s] had that training, and yet they learned what they needed. They learned by doing it.” The author goes on to take the reader-writer through a cogent course touching on such topics as punctuation, syntax, repetition, adjective and adverb use, point of view, voice, and other necessary concerns in writing both fiction and nonfiction narratives. Illustrative examples from outstanding writers and exercises for the reader round out this noteworthy handbook. Brad Hooper
Weekend Novelist, by Robert Ray
From the Publisher: During the week Robert J. Ray was a teacher. On weekends he learned the fiction writer’s craft and produced his first novel. He ended up selling six books in six years. The same success as a writer can happen to you.
His step-by-step program, the same one he uses himself and teaches in his popular fiction-writing class, organizes your writing around the weekends. Each weekend you work through the basics of character, scene, and plot, the construction of the novel in scenes and chapters, and the actual writing and editing of your book.
The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard
From the Publisher: Annie Dillard has spent a lot of time in remote, bare-bones shelters doing something she claims to hate: writing. Slender though it is, The Writing Life richly conveys the torturous, and in rare moments, transcendent existence of the writer. Even for Dillard, whose prose is so mellifluous as to seem effortless, the act of writing can seem a Sisyphean task: “When you write,” she says, “you lay out a line of words…. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow or this time next year.” Amid moving accounts of her own writing (and life) experiences, Dillard also manages to impart wisdom to other writers, wisdom having to do with passion and commitment and taking the work seriously. “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place…. Something more will arise for later, something better.” And, if that is not enough, “Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients,” she says. “That is, after all, the case…. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”
This all makes The Writing Life seem a dense, tough read, but that is not the case at all. Dillard is, after all, human, just like the rest of us. During one particularly frantic moment, four cups of coffee and not much writing down, Dillard comes to a realization: “Many fine people were out there living, people whose consciences permitted them to sleep at night despite their not having written a decent sentence that day, or ever.” –Jane Steinberg
