Best books about writing itself?

Best books about writing itself?

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From what I've seen, there are two well known ones.

First is Bird by Bird, about writing fiction (plot, characters etc).

And the other is On Writing Well, which is more for nonfiction.

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There's also but everyone seems to hate it.

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Found some more but I'd like to know if anyone else actually found them useful here on Veeky Forums.

Write, Publish, Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark
The 90-day Novel by Alan Watt
Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
Story Physics by Larry Brooks

I haven't read any of these so I can't speak to their quality. Just throwing some titles out there:
>Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster
>Confessions of a Young Novelist, Umberto Eco
>Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke
I'm wary of this "genre", maybe unfairly, since I've never read any of it.

Because it's shit.

Also, avoid any book that is about "get your novel published NOW!" So, pretty much everything listed: They are too partial in their scope, too focussed on getting one thing out and done instead of helping you with skills that would enable you to write a thousand works at your own facility. They are novel-as-a-product, and I guarantee you that if they had their focus on tea cosies or other crafts, they would write the same kind of book.

OP, instead, you all need good composition and reading skills and good practices and confidence. Theory is something you can pick up along the way, if you want. But works such as Forster's "Aspects of the Novel," Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," and other writers-on-writing books are either secondary or tertiary to your learning. Why? Because for starters, it robs you of your own agency to come up with your own answers and impressions from what you read and what you practice. And how do you also know that they will give you everything you need? You don't. Again, "good writing" doesn't mean "learn to write a literary or commercial novel." You're puffing up one specific form of writing into a measure of totality. These are not revolutionary writings on craft.

Instead, find books on some core skills and forms. The Progymnasmata have been a foundation of composition since the Greeks, and when coupled with what it leads to - Poetics and Rhetoric - they have secured the foundation of great Western literature. Progymnasmata starts with fables and works its way up in different forms of writing to arguing to introduce a law, which then naturally leads to further skills in argumentation and composition (Rhetoric). Key practices here include reading good works, copying them out to gain style, imitating them with more original material but with the same structure, and then paraphrasing and experimenting with the form to get it into your own body and bones. Progymnasmata forms like Narrative, Chreia, Ekphrasis, Ethopoeia, are modular and malleable: epics, dramas, lyric poetry, speeches, essays... are all built of these building blocks. And it is all laced with a constant practice of reading, copying, and experimenting. Confidence is quickly gained because from copying out fables and swapping animals and morals around, you can start to write your own, and they will definitely be fables.

Therefore, get yourself a book like Kennedy's translation of the Progymnasmata, get a copy of "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student" (4th edition), and get yourself a notebook and a pen. Build up your writing.

For style, screw Strunk and White - they are too prescriptive and impose inconsistent rules. In keeping with copying out good examples and learning from good writing, get Tufte's "Artful Sentences" - it is essentially a catalog of model sentences with commentary on technique, and like the progymnasmata, you start small and build up from short sentences.

>other writers-on-writing books are either secondary or tertiary to your learning
And I don't think I'm treating them as anything else. A film-maker's success will not be determined by his readings of textbooks on film direction or film theory, but I don't see anything wrong with supplementing his vocation with them. In fact, at least for me, books about writing have helped me become a better reader.

I agree, however, that those novel-as-product books are uninspiring. They're basically the equivalent of those business books that tell you how to start a business in 30 days. They might be useful if you have any gaping holes in your plan, but you won't be a successful businessman unless you already have the product, skill, passion etc.

Thanks for the recommendations though I will be looking them up.

>And I don't think I'm treating them as anything else. A film-maker's success will not be determined by his readings of textbooks on film direction or film theory, but I don't see anything wrong with supplementing his vocation with them. In fact, at least for me, books about writing have helped me become a better reader.

I agree! I wanted to say what I did because I know some people overemphasise them and treat them as gospel.

Thanks for making this good post.

>stephen king on writing
>step 1. Have pretty cool idea
>step 2. Write a shitty book around cool idea
>step 3. Copyright cool idea so no one can actually write a decent or great book around cool idea
>step 4. Repeat

Good post.

Nice post. Can you please give us more advice?

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Share your writings kiddo.

Sure.

It needs to be said that progymnasmatic (or "preliminary") forms can be thought of as building blocks for longer and more complex works of literature. Something like a novel can be considered as a sequence of elaborated Narratives, each one being a chapter or a scene, and each chapter/Narrative can be combined with description (Ekphrasis), speech in character (Ethopoeia), and so on. We combine them and meld them together like clay to produce our work. This goes into how the progym and rhetoric and poetics were taught. Nowadays, we are pretty fixed on how an essay should be, how a short story should be down to the number of words and its structure and its tone/content. Yet outside of some defining elements of a classical form (narrative being having a beg/mid/end, and also the now-infamous Who-What-When-Where-Why-How), students were encouraged to elaborate or shorten a model text, rearrange its structure, retell it in their own words. Later forms, such as a thesis, combine earlier forms into its own. Compared to more modern teaching, classical forms are given more room for the student to mess around with and combine. Experimentation is the word of the day, and even starting with fables, we can change out the details and action of the piece. We are given license to play.

This also means there are some common practices for our own learning, no matter what text we want to learn from: Reading, Copying, Imitating, and Experimenting (of which paraphrase is one experiment).

And to learn effectively, we need not so much theory as we do model texts. There is a classical catalogue - Libanius' Progymnasmata - which gives examples of each form that students read, copied, imitated, and then experimented on. For Fable and Narrative, at least, we can get ample material from Oxford Classics editions of Aesop's Fables (Laura Gibbs) and Apollodorus' Library of Greek Mythology.

Read. Copy. Imitate. Experiment.

We can apply the same method to writing that we admire and want to learn from. If you like Joyce, then don't be ashamed to copy out a story or a section of a story from Dubliners. It's all part of your training. If you like the sentences of Nabakov or Dante or Rilke or Franklin or Behn or Jonson or Borges or Wallace or Rosetti or Orwell or Hesse or Melville or Woolf or anyone that you admire, do not be afraid to copy them into your notebook and change the content to imitate its structures and power. Learning technique and foundational principles of writing doesn't limit your own expression. It strengthens your work by giving it structure. Expression sits on top of skill, so that every choice you make for your writing will be an informed and honest one. It will always be a way to say what you mean to say.

In all honesty, I'm still learning and collating this for myself, but I hope the methods and ideas presented here speak for themselves.

Of Grammatology

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I like bird by bird. A lot of the stuff in there seems kinda obvious, but it’s still very helpful to have it written out for you.

It would be ironic for you to write a book about this but you should unironically do it.

Some practice sentence sketches from my notebook:
Justice is a weasel.
Love is an electric ribbon.
Death is a night-cloth.
Emails are arrows.
The warehouse is a ribcage.
She was agony.
He was ecstasy.
They were the coffee shop.

The paper was his lifeline.
The coast was all times, everywhere.
His fingers were sticks.
Darkness was a tomb.
The pen is tamed.

He was in a fog.
He was off the cuff.
He was in his shadows.
He was between virtues.
He was in the market for virtue.

The nothingness continued.
The waiting dragged on through the afternoon.
The shadows continued.
The shadows continued past the door.

Playing off the script of the Talking Brown Paper Bag from P.T (silenthillmemories.net/silent_hills/pt_script_en.htm), focussing on intransitive sentences:
Autos honked. Trees rustled. People passed. I went out.
Lights flashed. Signals called. Cars squeaked Children ran.
I walked.
I could do nothing but walk. Through the streets, I passed stores and doors and windows and puddles and people with too much money and too little sense. I kept on walking. Crowds thinned. Stores became houses and gardens. Car horns turned to dogs. Dusk became night. I walked and became alone.
And then, I saw me walking in front of myself. But it wasn't really me. The only me is me.
I walked. I could do nothing but walk. Houses were sitting by the road. Their lights glowed, indifferently. The path continued, and I continued in front of myself. And then, I saw me turning to a house I knew, once. I followed. The sound of steps echoes along the path. Thouse house lights darkened. I approached the door left ajar. It opened into darkness. But not only darkness.
Watch out. The gap in the door... it's a separate reality.
The only me is me. Are you sure the only you is you?

Coupla nice ones in there, friendo. Seems like good practice. You ever just freely riff though? Or are you currently strictly trying to nurture an intuition for "good" writing?

Would you say that a writer should go into a piece with a theme or thesis already, constructing the story to convey the aforementioned meaning? That's how I've been writing and it doesn't seem to yield creative structure.

Both! I've been doing a lot more reading than writing currently, and admittedly I haven't done much daily practice because of that. That's my fault, however.

That's a really good and interesting question. From what I understand and from what I feel comfortable with, structure is one tool to help convey meaning. The content and how you express your theme or thesis also applies. I cannot give explicit advice on "do this, do that" because I'm still learning the ropes myself. I do, however, know that you need not only consider structure as a tool. Dialogue, description, how a character acts and reacts to their environment and other people can help to convey your meaning. I don't exactly know what you mean by "creative structure," however. I'd be really interested to understand more of what you're exploring and trying to achieve!

You're so cool, user. I want to be like you when I grow up.

Believe in you who believes in yourself!

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BRYAN GARNER'S THE DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN
ENGLISH USAGE WAS PRAISED BY THE LATE DFW!

The Anatomy of Story

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The Lively Art of Writing by Lucile Vaughan Payne

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Is this good? I’ve seen Lessons From the Screenplay reference it here and there, but it seemed like it just outlines the hero’s journey.

Speaking of LFTS, he’s recommended this before and I quite liked it.

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>Books on writing
Do you actually read this?

The post was cancer.

I highly suggest "How NOT to Write a Novel". It's a hilarious read and illustrates some common pitfalls by amateur (or even published) authors.

Nice post

Also, I recommend: how to read a book.
To write well you need to read accordingly.

Forget the anons who think they're too good for King despite never publishing anything themselves; On Writing is a good book. It's not the be-all-end-all, but it's still a decent intro.

Based capanon

I find reference/composition books to be the most useful in this class. The Elements of Style and the Elephants of Style are books I'll reference when I have a question about my grammar that cannot be easily answered. They're both useful in their own right.

The books about how to write fiction I find less helpful. On Writing by Stephen King was helpful to me as a 16 year old just freshly exploring the world of creative writing. In my early days of creation I'd follow King's 2000 words rule religiously. It's how I wrote 2 500 page novels when I was still in high school. The problem is those novels were absolute dog shit, not of high enough standard to really be called a "novel", but working on these got me tons of practice in writing. Those hours laid the soil for me to grow out of.

In hindsight I find a lot of advice offered by King, and other authors (I found Bradbury's "Zen and the Art of Writing" similarly problematic) to be of increasingly little use. You cannot be told how to craft a narrative, story, characters, theme, etc... These are things you must develop yourself. These authors who write novels prescribing rules you should follow typically write from their own perspective of what worked for them; inside of that perspective is a sort of selection bias. When I unshackled myself from the 2000 words rule I found my writing improved dramatically. King's assertion that you must have multiple hours a day to dedicate to writing is by no means applicable to all artists; there are accomplished writers who would crank out books in a couple of weeks and never write the rest of the year, and others who would write their novels on their iPhone while in a lunch break.

I firmly believe you can't learn fiction construction from novels like these. You unfortunately have to go the hard way. As such, I don't find these works to be of much use.

Honestly, I just liked On Writing for the sake of listening to King prattle on about nothing and everything. He's pretty good at making some silly shit seem interesting on paper. On screen? Uh... I dunno. But yeah, I remember enjoying his stories about his life and how he got started, how he dropped a cinder block on his foot; Damn, did that shit make me cringe.

Also, shout-out to the fact this is probably one of six or seven posts I've made on Veeky Forums in general, in what must be over a decade of lurking. I swear, I'm a fucking dinosaur, and about as talkative as one, presently.

FWIW I've been a pro editor for 15 years.

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Do you get nerves and doubt yourself when you try to post, or do you just not have anything meaningful to add most of the time?