At the AYE conference last week, I attended Johanna Rothman’s and Naomi Karten’s excellent writing workshop. During the workshop, I mentioned some of my favorite books about writing. Several people asked me to post a list of books that I’ve found helpful. Here’s the list.

First, here are the books that have helped me the most.

Being a Writer by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff.

“The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”
[Full Review]

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams.

How our choices of words, and our choices for arranging words, affect readers. How to revise your writing to better fit those expectations and make your writing clearer and more coherent.
[Full Review]

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

“Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.”
[Full Review]

Writing from the Inside Out by Dennis Palumbo.

“All good writing starts from where you are now.”
[Full Review]

Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico.

Centers on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic.
[Full Review]

Writing with Power by Peter Elbow.

Three important themes for writing: freewriting, energy, and experience.
[Full Review]

I’ve also found the following books very helpful.

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan.

Giving yourself permission and confidence to be fully creative.

Accidental Genius by Mark Levy.

Writing as a way to solve problems.

Adios, Strunk and White by Gary and Glynis Hoffman.

Fun book with lots of tips from improving your writing style.

The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes.

“If you’re not scared, you’re not writing.”

The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams.

How to make a claim and support it.

The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A morbidly hilarious book about grammar.

Edit Yourself by Bruce Ross-Larson.

A zillion examples of troublesome words, phrases, and patterns, with suggestions for improving each.

Effective Writing by Bruce Ross-Larson.

How to improve sentences, paragraphs, and whole pieces. Three books in one.

The Elements of Nonsexist Usage by Val Dumond.

Tips for gender-inclusive and gender-neutral writing.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White.

A classic. Concise and useful.

The New Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon.

A zany and delightful book about punctuation.

One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher.

“If writing is your practice, the only way to fail is not to write.”

On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

“The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.”

Rhetorical Grammar by Martha Kolln.

“The purpose here is … to help you understand the structure of sentences so that when you write you will understand the choices that are available to you — and the effect of those choices on your reader.”

Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg.

Expands on the ideas in Writing Down the Bones. Wild Mind includes more exercises than her earlier book.

The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler.

Creating characters and stories based on enduring mythic themes.

You Don’t Have to Write a Book! by Hal and Sidra Stone.

A painfully funny book about a thousand and one ways to make sure you never write a book. I can add a thousand-and-second way from my own experience: before writing your book, read all of these books about writing.

I learned three important themes from Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power: freewriting, energy, and experience. Elbow describes freewriting:

Freewriting is the easiest way to get words on paper and the best all-around practice in writing that I know. To do a freewriting exercise, simply force yourself to write without stopping for ten minutes.

You can see that freewriting is a simple idea. It is also powerful. When I write without stopping, I don’t have time to pay attention to my inner critic. I almost always delve past my surface thoughts (the ones it’s “okay” to write about), and find ideas that surprise me in their energy, clarity, and “truth.” Much of what I write while freewriting is junk (as I later allow my inner critic to tell me). But I can find a single idea that has energy, I’ve spent those ten minutes well.

Freewriting is one way to create energy in my writing. Another is revising: Discard any word, sentence, or paragraph that isn’t carrying its weight. As Elbow says, “Every word you throw away means another unit of energy preserved.”

About experience, Elbow says:

If you want readers to breathe life into your reading so that they get a powerful experience from it, then you must breathe experience into your words as you write. I don’t know why it should be the case that if you experience what you are writing about — if you go to the bamboo — it increases the chances of the reader’s experiencing the bamboo. But that’s the way it seems to work.

I’ve rescued more than one piece of limp writing by setting it aside, closing my eyes and revisiting the experiences that made me want to write the piece in the first place, and writing from that experience. In some cases I fold the new writing — which always has more energy — into the original piece. In most cases, I throw the original piece away and continue with the new.

Being a Writer, by Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff, is a gold mine of activities and assignments for exploring variations on your writing process.

One activity introduces “Sondra Perl’s Composing Guidelines” (available online in an excerpt from an earlier version of Being a Writer). Perl’s guidelines, guide you to explore your thoughts by focusing on a number of aspects one at a time. What draws my attention right now? What do I know about this topic? What makes this topic interesting to me? What’s missing? Moving back and forth from one focus to another helps you to explore your topic both broadly and deeply.

Another activity is “The Loop Process.” First you freewrite for ten minutes, letting your thoughts go wherever they will. Then you revise what you’ve written, shaping it and focusing it toward your topic and audience. Then you loop again and again, repeatedly diverging and converging. The authors offer several strategies for diverging during freewriting:

• Simply write whatever comes to mind, your first thoughts.
• Quickly list the moments or situations that somehow seem connected to the topic, or the stories or sequences of events that come to mind, or the people who seem central to the topic. Then choose one and write about it for five or ten minutes.
• Write a dialogue about the topic.
• Write as if you are another author, or as if you are writing to a different audience, or as if you are writing at another time and place.
• Write lies about the topic, or errors (statements that are almost right — tempting, but wrong), or “sayings” (real or invented) about the topic.

Elbow and Belanoff recommend keeping a process journal. After a writing session, journal about what you are experiencing and learning in your writing process. What happened as you wrote? What worked well? What was difficult? What led to the difficulty? How did you feel as you were writing? Process writing can be especially helpful, the authors say, “if you do it after two sessions — especially two sessions on the same piece — and compare what happened.”

I’ve barely scratched the surface of Being a Writer. There is plenty more, including ideas about freewriting, clustering, writing collaboratively, giving and receiving feedback, and the open-ended writing process. And that’s just the first section, on “Creativity and the Writing Process.” Other sections cover revising, researching, interviewing, and persuading and arguing.

My favorite quote from the book (hidden in a writing exercise on page 47): “The two main skills in writing are making a mess and cleaning up the mess.”

Being a Writer and Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace are my two favorite books about writing. While Style focuses on structure and content, Being a Writer focuses on the writing process. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.

Of all the books in my writing library, Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, helped me to make the biggest leap in the quality of my writing. Williams focuses on how our choices of words, and our choices for arranging our words, affect readers. One key idea is that readers they expect to find certain kinds of information in specific places, and that if we revise our writing to better fit those expectations, our writing will be clearer and more coherent.

For example, readers expect sentences to begin with familiar information, and to end with information that is newer. Also, readers look to the ends of phrases and sentences for information that is more significant. So we can make our writing clearer by shifting familiar, less important information to the beginnings of our sentences, and shifting newer, more important information to the ends. By applying this one tip, I improved both my writing and my confidence that I can write well.

Style and Elbow and Belanoff’s Being a Writer are my two favorite books about writing. While Being a Writer focuses on the writing process, Style focuses on structure and content. The techniques I learned from each book gave me not only the skill to write, but also the confidence to write.

Williams has also written Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace, a shorter version of Style that makes a handy reference book.

Near the end of Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg says, “Everything I say as a teacher is ultimately aimed at people trusting their own voice and writing from it.” Much of this book is about what happens inside us as writers, and how to bring what’s inside into our writing. Woven throughout are simple, powerful exercises for writing and for exploring ourselves as writers.

Goldberg offers five rules for writing practice (similar to what Peter Elbow calls “freewriting“):

1. Keep your hand moving.
2. Don’t cross out.
3. Don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, and grammar.
4. Lose control.
5. Go for the jugular.

As Goldberg says, it’s important to adhere to these rules, because:

[T]he aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, and not what it thinks it should see or feel.

Early in Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within, Dennis Palumbo says, “All good writing starts from where you are now.” What if “where I am now” is filled with loneliness, doubt, fear of rejection, and writer’s block? Palumbo says that we can use those feelings to serve our writing:

Invariably, once a writer fully experiences and integrates the lessons a block has to teach, his or her work deepens in richness, emotional truth, and, often, personal relevancy. … You can get there from here, not despite your writer’s block, but because of it. It means you’re ready — or, probably, more than ready — to make that important next step in your writing. [Emphasis mine]

How can we benefit from writer’s block? By writing about it!

If you’re frustrated at being stuck, or angry at yourself for your artistic limitations, write about that, as a journal entry, pure stream of consciousness.

I was feeling stuck as I was writing “Untangling Communication” for STQE Magazine (now called Better Software Magazine). I wanted to write about the “acceptance” step of the Ingredients of an Interaction, but I was also fearful. The acceptance step is not only about feelings, but about how we feel about our feelings! I’m going to write about a touchy-feelie subject like that? In a technical magazine!?

I had been reading Writing from the Inside Out around that time, and decided to write about my fears. In the process I discovered what, for me, was the most important point in that article: “The most powerful thing I can do to keep my communications straight, and to untangle them when they get tangled, is to accept what I feel.”

Palumbo also writes about the power of personal details:

[I]t’s one of the paradoxes of writing that the more particular and personal a detail in character or story, the more powerfully its impact generalizes out to the audience.

For an example of how personal details connect with other people, see Alan Francis’s reply to my recent, personal article about defensiveness.

This quote summarizes the book nicely:

If, as I’ve argued throughout this book, you are enough, then wherever you’re at, moment to moment, becomes the crucible out of which your writing flows. Accessing this subjective space, and wedding its range of colors with craft and perseverance, is the writer’s daily job.

Gabriele Rico’s Writing the Natural Way centers on clustering, a technique for quickly making explicit the ideas and associations we have about a topic:

To create a cluster, you begin with a nucleus word, circled, on a fresh page. Now you simply let go and begin to flow with any current of connections that come into your head. Write these down rapidly, each in its own circle, radiating outward from the center in any direction they want to go. Connect each new word or phrase with a line to the preceding circle. When something new and different strikes you, begin again at the central nucleus and radiate outward until those associations are exhausted.

Clustering, like freewriting or writing practice, is another technique I use frequently to move ideas out of my head and onto paper. Often I will “cluster” about a topic, then freewrite based on the cluster I’ve created.