A few good books

A few titles from my "favorites" list:

DeSalvo, Louise. (1999) Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. HarperSanFrancisco, San Francisco.
A classic, including lots of good footnotes to research on how autobiographical writing has a measurable impact on immune system function and all-purpose sanity levels. Some of the exercises are quite remarkable.

Elbow, Peter. (1973) Writing without Teachers. Oxford University Press, London and New York.
The classic on the writing process, simply the classic, endlessly imitated but never surpassed.

Elbow, Peter. (2000) Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. Oxford University Press, London and New York. Many of the essays here are directed at teachers, but many are useful for any writer. I've often wondered whether Elbow's comments on how writing should be taught might be useful for people traumatized by bad teachers, especially people in the sciences or social-sciences or engineering who faced subject-matter teachers making outrageously rigid demands that flatly contradict what one sees in the very best professional writing in those fields.

Elbow, Peter. (1998) Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford University Press, London and New York.
This book develops further the suggestions first made in Writing without Teachers (1973): it's more concise, it includes better-focused comments on revision, and so forth. Of course, in the process it loses something of the vulnerability and passion of the earlier work. Useful and very very smart no matter what kind of writing you are trying to compose or revise, because the exercises and questions are imaginative enough to apply to anything--not just the writing of arguments.

Lerner, B. (2000) The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Readers. Riverhead Penguin Putnam, New York.
She talks about fiction writers, with whom she seems insanely patient etc., but much of what she has to say is true about the publishing process generally.

McAdams, Dan. P. (1993) The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. The Guilford Press, New York.
He argues that what we mean by "identity" is the story we tell about who we are--and this story changes over time, and like any story it has major themes and images, characters, conflicts major and minor, subplots, etc. Fabulously useful for anyone writing a memoir or constructing characters or, hey, just trying to figure out who they are! Don't miss the "interview" questions in the back. It's almost worth starting there.

Peacock, Molly. (1999) How to Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle. Riverhead Books, New York.
a lovely, gracious, non-pretentious look at how poems mean and what poets do to make that happen.

Quinn, Arthur. (1993) Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase. Hermagoras Press, Davis, CA.
Nine chapters each begin with a short explanation of a strategy, followed by an extraordinary range of examples. This little book is a feast, an absolute feast.

Sands, Katherine, ed. (2004). Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent's Eye. The Writer Books, Waukesha WI.
A useful collection of essays by and interviews with agents: by the end, you understand (a) what a query letter has to do and (b) the range of ways in which agents think about and evaluate query letters.
ISBN 0-87116-206-7; available online at writermag.com. The Writer Books is an imprint of Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Schneider, Pat. (2003) Writing Alone and with Others. Oxford University Press, New York.
The classic application of Elbow’s insights into a method for community-based writing groups. Terrific exercises from someone with real insight into the creative process.

Sher, Gail. (1999) One Continuous Mistake: Four Noble Truths for Writers. Penguin Compass, New York.
The best book I know on writing as a spiritual practice: if you are called to be a writer, and you are not writing, then of course you will be miserable. But the book is relaxed and open and inviting, not a guilt-inducing harangue. She's a Zen Buddhist.

Smiley, Jane. (2005) Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Knopf, New York.
Superb literary criticism, just superb, and her segue into writing a novel of one's own is both gracious and sophisticated. It's rare that anyone with this quality of technical insight and scholarly training is willing to avoid academic babble and speak to genuine readers-and-writers. The more I play around with her core ideas the more fruitful they seem. Her short critiques of 100 novels take up half the book, so it's not really the hefty tome it seems at first glance.

Tannen, Deborah. (1986) That's Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Your Relations With Others. Ballantine Books, New York.
useful for writers too

Tannen, Deborah. (1990) You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. Ballantine Books, New York.
hilarious in places, just hilarious--and no doubt invaluable (as all her books are) for anyone writing dialogue.

Tannen, Deborah. (2006). You're Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation. Random House, New York.

Truss, Lynn. (2003) Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Gotham Books, New York.
hysterically funny--at least for some people. Others in my family doubted my sanity. For all that, however, it's also quite misleading for Americans, because British punctuation does follow remarkably different comma rules. For Americans, the best account I've ever seen is the appendix on punctuation in Joseph Williams, Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. After I read Williams, I retired my own handout on punctuation.

Tyler, Anne. (1980) "Still Just Writing." In The Writer on Her Work, Volume 1, edited by Janet Sternburg, New York: W. W. Norton.
Believe it or not, people come up to Anne Tyler to ask her if she has a proper job yet, or if she is “still just writing.” It’s an hilarious and yet deeply thoughtful meditation on the challenges and the blessings of trying to write around our obligations to our families, our communities, and to our other talents. The first time I read it, many years ago when my three children were very young, I sat fighting tears of gratitude and relief at such tough wisdom about how the complexities of our lives ultimately feed the richness of our work.

Williams, Joseph. M. (2000) Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Longman, New York.
A glorious, highly creative, long-polished account of how to revise sentences to make them clearer. He has some very powerful techniques and they are illustrated very effectively. If you work through these ten chapters thoughtfully on your own, and not in too much of a hurry, both you reading and your writing will improve substantially. It's expensive, because it's basically a college textbook. On the other hand, editions differ primarily in their exercises, not in their substance. I'd look for older editions at Alibris.com or places like that, where earlier editions may be available for a pittance. If I ever taught writing again in a classroom setting where I had to give grades, this is what I'd want to do and to use--and only this. If people sneaked manuscripts to me, I’d read them, of course, but neither of us would ever tell the administration.