Good Books To Read On How To Write
Ditto on Zinsser. When I ask my students what was the best thing they got from my magazine writing class,…
The Elements of Style by William Strunk & E.B. White
The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes
The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging by the editors of the Post.
Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction–and Get It Published by Alfred Fortunato and Susan Rabiner
The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner
The Portable MFA in Creative Writing by The New York Writers Workshop
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Also check out:
Poets & Writers magazine (www.pw.org)
Ditto on Zinsser. When I ask my students what was the best thing they got from my magazine writing class, many of them (particularly older students) say Zinsser. (I keep wanting them to say “Jane’s great wisdom!)
I would add Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. It isn’t exactly a how to book, and it doesn’t even have six memos (he died before he finished the set he was writing for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard). Rather, it’s 5 essays on the qualities in writing he admired: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. It is a delight.
Jane