Writers read, and often, readers write. Sometimes, writers even read books about writing, many of which have gained traction over the years as classics for other writers to reference as they work on their own books. We’ve read many books over the years that have inspired our writing and helped our stories and imaginations grow. Here are a few of those books and the insights we took away from them.
1. Add Flavor with Let Me Tell You by Shirley Jackson
No one does it quite like Shirley Jackson. This book contains much more than just essays on writing. In its pages, you can find early short stories, unpublished fiction, and book reviews. The whole volume ends with essays on writing, finishing off with Jackson’s unforgettable lecture, “Garlic in Fiction,” a short piece that summons writers to work hard for the attention of their readers.
The essay begins with a pointed line, an immediate angle on the topic, that encapsulates so much of what Jackson’s fans love about her: “Far and away the greatest menace to the writer—any writer, beginning or otherwise—is the reader.”
2. Start Early with One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
American writers from the southern United States have a long history of spinning immersive tales, and Eudora Welty is no exception. Bringing a deft, surgical hand to her short stories, each one is infused with a sense of justice and longing for a better world. Yet she is unafraid to keep looking at the present world until a better one arrives, a talent that we understand better by reading her book, One Writer’s Beginnings.
At the start of the book, she speaks about her insatiable love for books, even before she was old enough to know how to read them.
“It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.”
3. Read Like a Writer with Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
Compiled from lectures that Nabokov gave while he taught at Wellesley and Cornell, this book brings together Nabokov’s insights on famous works of literature like Bleak House, Mansfield Park, and Ulysses. Laced into the analysis are practical lessons and insights for writers. Here’s one of our favorite quotes from the opening chapter, “Good Readers and Good Writers.”
“The three facets of the great writer— magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought…It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”
4. Listen Closely with James Baldwin: The Last Interview
Some of our favorite lessons on writing have come from unexpected places, not books where that is the focus but interviews where we see a writer’s mind at work from a different angle, yet the wheels of writing still turn. One of these is in The Last Interview series, a series that we read often out loud together. In James Baldwin: The Last Interview, he had this to say to reporter XYX about the celebrity that comes with writing.
“One of the hazards of being an American writer…is that eventually you have nothing to write about…There is a decidedly grave danger of becoming a celebrity, of becoming a star, of becoming a personality…It’s symptomatic of the society that doesn’t have any real respect for the artist. You’re either a success or a failure and there’s nothing in between.”
Later, he says, “A writer is supposed to write. If he appears on television or as a public speaker, so much the better or so much the worse, but the public persona is one thing. On the public platform or on television. I have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about. It’s antithetical to the effort you make at the typewriter, where you don’t know a damned thing. And you have to know you don’t know it. The moment you carry the persona to the typewriter, you are finished.”
5. Talk Shop with Talking as Fast as I Can by Lauren Graham
Lauren Graham’s Talking As Fast as I Can is about much more than writing, but she spends some time talking about her process for writing, shared with her by screenwriter Don Roos. In a chapter called “Kitchen Timer,” she outlines this method, where a writer decides ahead of time how long they plan to write on a given day, sets it as an appointment on their calendar, and writes or journals for that given amount of time, with no distractions or breaks. This simple method has been unforgettable since we read it, a tool that has helped us in seasons of being stuck.
Read the book for the full method, along with many other tales from her time writing, acting, and living. Or, check out this Medium post for an overview of the method and a lengthier synopsis of the book.
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