Inhabit worlds. Clear your mind. Make space. Looking for more great books that will inspire you to become a better writer? Here are a few of our favorites, from the more obscure to the well-loved.
1. Imagine and Inhabit Other Worlds with Words Are My Matter by Ursula K. Le Guin
This book collects together Ursula K. Le Guin’s wisdom on writing across her talks and essays, as well as her book introductions and book reviews. Hear her thoughts on her contemporaries and their writing, as well as her reflections on the classic authors that came before her. From a 2002 talk given at a meeting of Oregon Literary Arts, we gleaned this memorable gem about writers and their indispensable tool: The imagination.
“I think imagination is the single most useful tool mankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.”
Later she says, “Imagination is not a means of making money. It has no place in the vocabulary of profit-making. It is not a weapon, though all weapons originate from it, and their use, or non-use, depends on it, as with all tools and their uses. The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.”
2. Clear Your Mind with On Writing by Stephen King
This book certainly sits in the “famous for a reason” category, as one of the more recent books to become a classic in the books-on-writing category. On Writing will help you see beyond the looming mountain of writer’s block and focus instead on each step up the hiking trail that will get you to the other side. It’s a book that tackles the nuts-and-bolts of writing, about the craft itself and how you can get better each step of the way. Full of pithy pull-quotes, there are many easy lessons to take away from this book, but one of our favorite parts allows us to zoom out and see the mountain again, with a better perspective on what we are facing and whether or not the journey is worth it.
“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
3. Rethink Your Framework with Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
One of the benefits of reading books about writing is coming into authors with different frameworks than your own, different ways of seeing how a story works, different definitions and rules to break within the novels that you write.
In this book composed of nine sections from lectures sponsored by Trinity College, Cambridge, Forster invites us into his way of seeing through novels rather than round them. While it might not be the system of thinking about writing that you end up following, it will challenge you to think through your own framework for writing fictional stories.
As he describes the difference between plot and story, one of his more challenge definitions, outside of how we would typically think of them, Forster says this:
“If it is in a story, we say: ‘And then?’ If it is in a plot we ask: ‘Why?’ That is the fundamental difference between these two aspects of the novel. A plot cannot be told to a gaping audience of cave-men or to a tyrannical sultan or to their modern descendants the movie-public. They can only be kept away by ‘And then—and then—’ they can only supply curiosity. But a plot demands intelligence and memory also.”
4. Make Space with A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
In her classic book, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf invites us to look at the world as it has been but also to picture the world as it could be, imagining the world if women had been a part of the literary conversations earlier. It is difficult to pull just one gem from a book as well-knitted as this one, so we’d recommend you read it for yourself, start to finish. But if you need a little encouragement for today, here’s what Virginia Woolf had to say about setting aside the pressure of judgement in order to get to work writing:
“Are not reviews of current literature a perpetual illustration of the difficulty of judgement? ‘This great book’, ‘this worthless book’, the same book is called by both names. Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes. So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
5. Learn through Reflection with A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has been recommended by writers for decades, as much a memoir of his early years writing as it is a source for lessons about the craft. Describing Hemingway’s years in Paris after World War I, struggling with his writing and relationships, we observe his habits as a young man. In one instructive passage in the second chapter, Hemingway talks about the anxiety of thinking he will never write again.
“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.’”
A bit later, he describes going to museums to look at paintings as a way of informing his writing, giving us a glimpse into his thought process as he mines other art forms to strengthen his own.
“If I walked down by different streets to the Jardin du Luxembourg in the afternoon I could walk through the gardens and then go to the Musée du Luxembourg where the great paintings were that have now mostly been transferred to the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume. I went there nearly every day for the Cézannes and to see the Manets and the Monets and the other Impressionists that I had first come to know about in the Art Institute at Chicago. I was learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone.”
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