There was a time when I bought books about writing with a hunger and a purpose. I just knew that one of them, or maybe two or three, held the secrets to the universe of Being A Writer. You know about that universe: the one where fully-realized sentences seems to transfer from your unconscious to paper or screen with merely a flick of the whatever. In time, I realized that the act of buying the books was not the same as the act of doing the writing. In time, I realized that I knew most of what was in them and was really looking for the company of other writers. Now I go to my monthly gathering of the Writers Who Wine and spend my book budget on alcohol (like a real writer!).
These days when I look at the shelf where my writing books live, I take a nostalgic traipse down the memory lane of Writing Projects I Once Had. From the years that I spent my days plotting mysteries come The Writer’s Complete Crime Reference Book, Mystery Writer’s Source Book, and Deadly Doses: a writer’s guide to poisons, to name just a few. From the LA years when I spent my days plotting screenplays come The Art of Adaptation: Turning Fact and Fiction into Film and Making a Good Script Great and How To Write A Movie In 21 Days, again to name just a few.
I don’t know which, if any, of these books are still in print. If they’re not, then others of similar titles have come to fill the gap. The fact is that the writing of writing advice is an industry (yes, I’m aware of the irony in my writing that sentence). I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all: the writers get to profit from their experience (because god knows, they’re not from their writing) and readers get useful information, hand-holding and/or butt-kicking, depending on what their need at the moment.
Should you need any of those three things–or just a books to sip your wine with–here are several sites where you can dig in:
Amazon’s Top TwentyFive Books About Writing
Happy reading…. Happy writing!
