What are the best books to help improve my writing?
If you want to write better, there are plenty of books out there that can help.
Here are four books that will help you write better
if you want to learn to write better, start with these four books. I’ve read all four, and I love each. Each has a different focus, and each will help you look at and improve your writing from a different perspective.
1. The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White
This book tops most writers’ lists of best writing guides. In just a few pages, it covers all the basics of good writing, whether fiction or nonfiction. Don’t let its brevity fool you—this book misses nothing important. Whether it talks about word order or tightening your prose, this book will help you craft sentences that have more impact. Its principles are time-tested, so you can trust every piece of advice this book contains. No, this book won’t tell you what to write, but it will help you write better.
2. Telling Writing, by Ken Macrorie
Even though it is an out-of-print college composition textbook, Telling Writing is in many ways the best overall book on writing no one has ever heard of. Its advice on how to craft better sentences is without peer, and it’s worth reading just for its chapter on how good writing tells the truth. Telling Writing can help you break the awful habit of writing what you think others expect you to say, freeing you instead to write what matters to you. It teaches how to use concrete details to make your writing come alive and helps you avoid vague, pretentious, wordy phrases and jargon. I can’t say enough about this book.
3. On Writing, by Stephen King
Love him or hate him, Stephen King has succeeded because he can tell a story without tripping over his own prose. If only more fiction writers would read this book. Like The Elements of Style, this book is short, but its advice is concrete and actionable. Never use a thesaurus, King says. Eliminate most adverbs, King says. Read this book and do everything he says.
4. Thanks, But This Isn’t for Us: A (Sort of) Compassionate Guide to Why Your Writing is Being Rejected, by Jessica Page Morrell
Even if you’re not an aspiring fiction writer, you can still learn much from this great book. Jessica Morrell is an established literary agent who desperately wants would-be fiction writers to submit better material. Why? Because she has to sell the materials you submit to publishers, and she wants to have a fighting chance to make that sale. She is also sick of reading bad submissions. She will tell you what to do and not do when writing a story. After reading her book, I noticed how well-written fiction always followed the same rules she talked about, like the time-tested practice of throwing your characters into scrapes every few pages. So, follow her tips, unless you want to keep getting rejected.
Happy writing!
Read these books, and feel free to suggest a few titles of your own. And feel free to contact me if there’s a book you think I missed, or you just have some questions about writing, especially writing your own book: