Thursday, October 22, 2009

More to Read

The post mentioning Stephen King's ON WRITING drew a lot of positive feedback in the comments and the emails, so I thought I would throw out a few other books that help me throughout my writing process.

One great resource is THE 3 A.M. EPIPHANY by Brian Kiteley. It's a book that is loaded with exercises to try and get you thinking outside the box. Kitely is a creative writing prof at the University of Denver, and the thing this helped me a lot with is writing tighter.

Struggle with dialogue? Then you gotta read LUSH LIFE by Richard Price. It's not a help book, but he's a master of writing dialogue. Reading that book showed me ways to use dialogue differently, ways to use different voices and it just plain helped me in that department. Besides, it's a damn good book.

One of your characters missing something? Check out WRITER'S GUIDE TO CHARACTER TRAITS by Linda Edelstein. This book won't tell you a better way to write characters, but it will show you how to give them more layers. This book helped me make my characters seem more realistic.

Those are just a few. Of course, one of my tips for any kind of writer is to read, read, read. Then take a nap, write and read some more.

Anybody else have some good resources that helped you in your writing? Share them in the comments for everybody. Go on. Don't be bashful.

3 comments:

  1. My two absolute favorites:

    Making Shapely Fiction (Jerome Stern)
    What If? (Anne Bernays & Pamela Painter)

    They both offer tons of exercises and insights.

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  2. Thanks, Sara. I'll have to check those out!

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  3. I loved The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing from Writer's Digest and 20 Master Plots and how to build them by Ronald Tobias. I also heard Bird by Bird was great but I haven't read it yet. Thanks for the recomendations.
    I make a point to read debut novels to see what's selling.
    Thanks for sharing your progress with us, I really enjoyed reading it. It made me feel a little better about my own struggles.

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