In Praise of Writing Manuals

I learned how to give guest bylines—I’m a hero! Just in time to introduce a new guest poster, famed main character of many previous Rose-coloured newsletters and my husband; also author, journalist, communications guy, and cat parent Mark Sampson.
Go, Mark:

There was an interview that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison gave back in the aughts that I absolutely love, though I’ll be damned if I can find a clip of it on YouTube, or even remember who it was with. In this exchange, Morrison talked about how, upon finishing each new book, she needed to re-teach herself how to write books before she could begin the next one. It was as if the skills and experiences, the trials and lessons learned while composing a novel, would evaporate as soon as the project was done. She said that she genuinely believed that each book she wrote would be her last—including her first. Perhaps the key to keeping going, Morrison seemed to say, was to recognize that you approach each new novel as a novice.

This is something that really resonates with my own creative life. I too find that a hush falls over my writing after I’ve completed a novel, a sense of loss, or at least disorientation. I’ll look at the manuscript I’ve recently completed and think: I know I just did all that, but I don’t know HOW I did all that. What’s more, I can never seem to dive immediately into the next novel after I’ve finished the last one. I always have to spend months writing something else—or, more specifically, a series of somethings—short fiction, poetry, literary criticism. It’s kind of like rotating crops through a field: you need to give the soil in which you grow a book chance to replenish itself.

But when I gear up to start a new novel, one thing I almost always do as part of that process is read (or re-read) a slew of creative writing manuals from the not-insubstantial library that I’ve amassed over the years. Some authors really poo-poo writing manuals, saying that you can learn everything you need to by reading the Big Classics of Literature and shouldn’t bother with a bunch of technical guidebooks. To which I reply: Why can I read both? For me, my favourite writing manuals not only reinforce the basics—things I know, deep down in my core as a writer, but still can forget or need reminding of—and also inspire me to write, to take the plunge into a long, complicated work of fiction where it can sometimes feel like there are no guides other than my own act of imagination.

For me, the writing manuals I keep turning back to fall into two broad camps. The first focuses on what I call “tip of the pen” writing—that is, books that help me improve at the level of craft. These manuals tend to see writing as a kind of trade that can be taught to those who show enough aptitude for it, with the aim of making one’s work technically better. The second camp focuses more on the soul of a writer, how authors observe the world around them and process it into effective works of fiction or poetry. These manuals tend to see writing as more art than craft and aim to help us understand what we must do (or become, or bear witness to) before we can begin to write well. Of course, most good creative writing guides touch on both camps.  

Here are just a few books about writing that have meant a lot to me and/or I’ve read multiple times over the years while between novels:

• A Passion for Narrative, by Jack Hodgins While there are many excellent technical descriptions in Hodgins’ book, I would argue that it still falls squarely into the “soul of a writer” camp discussed above. Hodgins is primarily concerned with unlocking writers’ enthusiasm for storytelling, for getting them to tap into the magic that narrative can evoke. As he puts it: “Good writing should be something that scares the writer a little—the reader too—the way a bolt of lightning can do. It startles, frightens, but it also illuminates for a moment, perhaps even shows us our way in the dark.”

• On Writing, by Stephen King King, well-known for his mega-selling horror novels, uses this volume to detail the processes and principles that help shape his work. The book is, as advertised, an actual memoir: there are lengthy sections on King’s childhood, his long and impoverished apprenticeship as a writer, and the 1999 roadside accident in rural Maine that nearly killed him. The real meat of this book, however, is King’s technical descriptions of writing, his workmanlike advice on how to make bad prose good and good prose better.

• Living by Fiction, by Annie Dillard As the title would suggest, this is a book from the second camp mentioned above, one more concerned with how a writer should be than with what a writer should do. In this essay collection, Dillard approaches the inner world of writing and of literature as a question of epistemology. In sections with names like “The Fiction of Possibility,” “Can Fiction Interpret the World,” and “About Symbol, and with a “Diatribe Against Purity,” she raises complex questions about the writer’s role in channeling the world through fiction and then elevating a wider artifice of meaning through that act.

• Attack of the Copula Spiders, by Douglas Glover Like King, Glover is concerned principally with what happens below the writer’s wrists—that is, the moment of contact with the page and the choices writers make as their words form sentences, sentences form paragraphs and paragraphs form stories. In the bluntly titled chapters “How to Write a Novel” and “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” Glover offers a clinical approach to strengthening works of fiction at the level of the sentence. Readers will find that Glover’s advice and examples are deeply complex and technical, and are targeted at more senior-level writers.

• A Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem, by Susan Ioannou I don’t limit myself to writing manuals that are strictly about prose. Interestingly, Ioannou not only straddles both camps mentioned above, but also writes in a manner applicable to the novice and experienced poet. For example, she provides a high-school definition of comparative imagery and its role in verse, writing, “The most basic kind is the simile, where two items are compared directly using ‘like’ or ‘as’ … However, the English language is rich with less-obvious, implied comparisons.” But then she will go on to explain, in detailed terms, concepts such as the linear, extended and parallel metaphor as they apply to poetry. I find that these principles can help with writing fiction, too.

• Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story, by John Yorke This book is a wonderful reminder that technical discussions around writing need not be focused on the level of the sentence, that the structure of storytelling is just as important as anything else. While Yorke touches on the various beats that make for good storytelling, he also reminds us about the point of good storytelling—that is, the point of artifice itself. It’s all about seeing and shaping patterns in what is ultimately the randomness of existence. Stories allow us to stare into abyss and impose, even for a short while, some broader meaning onto the chaos.

• Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, by Mary Norris If you have even a passing familiarity with The New Yorker, one thing that you’ll notice is that it really loves its commas. As the magazine’s chief copyeditor (or is it copy editor?), Norris has written a whole book about why that is—and so much more. This manual/memoir reinforces a very important point that all writers need to consider: that decisions around punctuation, word choice, word order, and what to elide or include in a sentence, are not merely about grammatical correctness. They’re about your prose’s musicality, about how you make your writing sing.

• Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction, by Benjamin Percy This is a recent read for me, but one I will be coming back to again and again. Percy offers concrete advice around how to crank up the tension and suspense in a story. He offers tips on how to handle scenes of violence, how to create iconic, memorable moments in a story, and the importance of knowing your characters in a 360-degree sort of way (including how they make their living—a detail often ignored by authors, especially when writing literary fiction.) Percy also emboldens us to see revision as an actual re-envisioning of our story; he gives us permission to tear walls down and start over. I really wish this book had existed 30 years ago when I was in the early stages of my own writing journey.

I know a lot of subscribers to Rebecca’s newsletter are also authors, so tell me: what are your favourite manuals? What books about some aspect of the art or craft of writing stand out for you? Leave a comment below and let us know.