The Craft Books Worth Keeping Close

I recently looked at the shelves beside my desk where I keep books about writing and realized something: a writer’s bookshelf can grow almost accidentally.

One instructor recommends a book. A conference speaker mentions another. Someone insists a particular title changed the way she writes. Before long, you have a respectable collection of books about writing, but not necessarily a well-rounded library of writing craft.

So I took a harder look at mine.

As a publisher, editor, author, and writing instructor, I don’t need twelve books telling me essentially the same thing about plot. I want books that do different jobs. Some should teach. Some should challenge. Some should help diagnose what isn’t working. And some should be the kind of reference I reach for again and again.

This isn’t intended to be a definitive list of the best books ever written about writing. Instead, these are books that do different jobs and, together, can create a useful working library.

Here’s how I would build that shelf today.

General Writing Craft

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

This is one of the books I would be least willing to remove from my shelf.

Although Zinsser wrote primarily about nonfiction, his insistence on clarity, simplicity, humanity, and eliminating clutter benefits nearly every writer. Good writing doesn’t become better because we add more words to it. Often, the opposite is true.

If you write articles, devotionals, memoir, teaching material, books, or other nonfiction, On Writing Well deserves a place within reach.

Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark

This is exactly what the title promises: a collection of practical tools writers can use.

Clark breaks the craft into fifty-five strategies addressing everything from sentence construction and word choice to pacing, structure, and the habits involved in doing the work. The short, focused chapters make this an especially useful book to return to rather than something that has to be read once and shelved.

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

Not every important book about writing needs to function like a textbook.

Lamott writes about the less tidy parts of being a writer: terrible first drafts, perfectionism, discouragement, jealousy, persistence, and the enormous task of turning an idea into pages.

The title itself offers enduring advice. You don’t write an entire book at once. You write what is in front of you, one piece at a time.

Steering the Craft by Ursula K. Le Guin

Le Guin focuses on the actual workings of prose: sound, rhythm, sentence length, repetition, point of view, description, and other choices that create a writer’s voice on the page.

It fills an important space in a craft library because craft is not synonymous with plot. Writers also need to learn how to make sentences work.

Fiction

Fiction shelves can become crowded quickly. There are dozens of systems for beats, arcs, plot points, scenes, and story structure. You don’t need all of them.

What you do need are resources that help you understand both how a story works and how fiction works on the page.

The Anatomy of Genres by John Truby

Truby looks beyond the idea that genre is simply a marketing category. Different kinds of stories make different promises to readers, and those genres have distinctive structures, conventions, and expectations.

That makes The Anatomy of Genres particularly useful for understanding what makes a horror story work as horror, a love story satisfy as a love story, or a fantasy function as fantasy.

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway

Where books about structure help us understand the architecture of a story, Burroway provides a broader education in fiction itself.

Character, point of view, dialogue, setting, plot, imagery, and revision make this the kind of comprehensive reference that can help both a developing novelist and an editor diagnose why a manuscript isn’t quite working.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

Finishing a manuscript and revising a manuscript are different skills.

Browne and King address common problems such as unnecessary exposition, ineffective dialogue, point of view, interior monologue, proportion, beats, and the balance between scene and summary.

For writers preparing to submit a novel, this may be one of the most practically useful books on the shelf.

Nonfiction

Nonfiction is an enormous category, and no single formula works equally well for a theological book, self-help book, history, devotional, leadership book, or practical guide.

Still, one question matters across much of commercial nonfiction: What will this book do for the reader?

Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick

Fitzpatrick is particularly good for practical nonfiction. His emphasis is on creating books that deliver genuine value rather than merely collecting everything an author knows about a subject.

That distinction matters.

Expertise can produce information. Good nonfiction turns information into something organized around the reader’s needs.

Pair this with Zinsser, and you have a strong foundation for practical nonfiction: one book asking whether the material is useful and another asking whether it is written clearly.

Memoir and Personal Narrative

Writing about something that actually happened does not eliminate the need for craft. In some ways, it makes craft more complicated.

Memoirists must make decisions about selection, structure, memory, voice, privacy, other people’s stories, and the difference between what happened and what belongs in the book.

Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser

Zinsser approaches memoir with his characteristic emphasis on selection and clarity. A life contains far too much material to put into one book. The memoirist’s task is not simply remembering but deciding what story is actually being told.

Karr adds an important perspective on memory, voice, truth, difficult experiences, and the people who inevitably appear in someone else’s story.

The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

For writers working with painful or complicated personal material, those questions matter as much as sentence construction.

Writing for Children

“Children’s books” sounds like one genre until you begin publishing them.

A thirty-two-page picture book and an eighty-thousand-word YA novel have remarkably little in common beyond having readers who have not yet reached adulthood.

The Art and Craft of Writing for Children, edited by William Zinsser

This collection is valuable for thinking seriously about writing for young readers rather than treating children’s literature as simplified adult writing.

But writers also need resources specific to the kind of children’s book they are creating.

Writing Picture Books by Ann Whitford Paul

Picture books are deceptively difficult.

The limited word count, page turns, rhythm, read-aloud quality, relationship between text and illustration, and demands placed on every sentence make picture-book writing its own craft.

For anyone serious about writing picture books, Paul’s book deserves consideration.

Writers working in middle grade or young adult fiction should likewise seek resources specifically devoted to those forms rather than assuming general children’s-writing advice will cover everything they need.

Poetry

A writing library that ignores poetry is incomplete, even for people who don’t consider themselves poets.

Poetry teaches attention to language.

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

Oliver introduces elements such as sound, rhythm, meter, form, diction, and imagery in an accessible way.

Those skills don’t stay inside poetry. Learning to hear language can improve prose too.

And for poets, inspiration is not enough. Poetry has a craft just as fiction and nonfiction do.

Keep Good References Within Reach

Not every useful book on a writer’s shelf is meant to be read cover to cover.

A good dictionary, thesaurus, usage guide, and appropriate style manual can earn their shelf space simply by providing reliable answers when you need them. For book publishing, The Chicago Manual of Style is the reference I reach for most often.

The point isn’t to accumulate every reference available. It’s to know where to turn when a question arises so you don’t have to rely on memory, habit, or whatever answer appears first in a search.

What About Books Specifically for Christian Writers?

I deliberately haven’t filled this list with books about “Christian writing.”

At Abundance Books, we publish books for the Christian market, but good writing is still good writing.

A Christian novelist needs to understand character, conflict, dialogue, point of view, and story. A Christian memoirist faces the same questions about truth, memory, privacy, and narrative selection as any other memoirist. A Christian children’s author still has to master the particular demands of writing a picture book.

There are additional craft questions when writing about faith. How do you incorporate Scripture without interrupting the reader’s experience? How do you write about spiritual transformation without turning a story into a sermon? How much biblical knowledge can you assume your reader has? How do you write authentically about experiences that are deeply personal and spiritual?

Those questions deserve attention. But a Christian label on the cover of a writing manual doesn’t automatically make it a better craft book.

I’d rather learn fiction from someone who understands fiction, memoir from someone who understands memoir, and prose from someone who understands language exceptionally well, then apply those skills faithfully to the work I’m called to write.

Build a Working Library, Not a Collection

The goal isn’t to own all of these books. It’s to have resources that help us become better writers and to know which one to reach for when we’re struggling with a particular part of the craft.

Some books we read from beginning to end. Some we study. Some sit within reach because sooner or later we know we’ll need them.

Of course, there’s one flaw in this whole bookshelf strategy: owning the books doesn’t make us better writers. We actually have to read them.

I have my own stack of TBR books, including more than a few on the craft of writing. Maybe the best writing book isn’t always the next one we buy. Sometimes it’s the one already sitting on our shelf, waiting to be opened.

A quick note: Some book links in this article are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no additional cost to you.