The Word Cloud

Er ... This is one of those topics where the clue is in the title. I'm kind of hoping that people will tell me what they think are the best "How to Write" books for complete beginners.

When I had my big learning-to-write phase, I read quite a lot of material. James Frey's How to Write a Damn Good Novel was about the best of the bunch, but great it was not. Any other suggestions?

I am currently reading "The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (And How To Avoid Them)" by Jack Bickham.

Divided, as the title implies, into 38 very short chapters, it is instructive, easy to read and also easy to pick up and put down as it suits. I tend to read my copy in the throne room and can get through a chapter before the wife knocks on the door and asks if there was a problem with last night's curry. Eat plenty of roughage and you will get through this book in double quick time. Not an exhaustive treatise, but a good place to start.
AS

At the technique end of things I tend to favour how-to-read books, because they're less prescriptive. David Lodge's The Art of Fiction is fab, and James Woods's with the same title isn't at all comprehensive, but has a masterly exposition of free indirect style and how to handle moving multiple PoV and voice. Also Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer is absolutely brilliant, and more systematic. John Mullan's How NOvels Work is good too, and also more systematic. And the Paris Review interviews with every great writer you've ever heard of are also fascinating, and get you thinking about how it all works: you don't have to be a fan of a particular writer to find what they say about writing hugely helpful: I've been made to think hugely by writers whose work I haven't even read.

For an all-round course in learning to write well Magrs & Bell The Creative Writing Coursebook is an excellent book: they used to run the UEA MA and it's the one I recommend, as it's just as good taken in bits as worked through from start to finish.

I started with a huge prejudice against How Not to Write A Novel, because I hate prescriptive books, but it looks absolutely brilliant, though I've only dipped so far.

John Moat and John Fortune founded the Arvon Foundation and their The Way To Write is excellent at the prose level; from it has sprung certain CW orthodoxies, but you shouldn't blame it for that. There are other books in that series, all by excellent authors - Joan Aiken does the Children's one.

John Gardner's The Art of Fiction is completely brilliant - again, don't blame God for what people do in his name: buy into his rigour and ruthlessness, not necessarily his opinions.

The Joy of Writing Sex by Elizabeth Benedict does just what it says on the tin, and is hugely useful for this particularly difficult (I nearly said 'hard', but I won't) area. If you can write sex well, you can write anything well, I often think.

You do have to be careful with books which are really about screenwriting, but they are useful on plot and structure, as long as you remember that screenplays are a much tighter, smaller, plot-driven and more prescribed form. I know a million people who swear by Robert McKee's Story, so I'll break my rule of not recommending books which I haven't read for that one.

Of the more how-to-find-inspiration and how-to-survive books, Dorothea Brande's Becoming a Writer is the perennial classic, Natailie Goldman's Writing Down the Bones, Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird (very funny!), Susan Sellars anthology of lots of writers tackling particular issues with inspiration and exercises which I think is called Catching Reality by Surprise.

Practicalities: Alison Baverstock's So You Think You've Got A Book In You is very good if you're trying to decide whether to go for the writing thing full tilt. Jane Wenham-Jones's Wannabe a Writer? is funny and realistic - the only one which discusses the serious problem of Writer's Arse. Michael Legat has several books on writing, including invaluable ones like An Author's Guide to Publishing. Another which is very good on the baffling counterintuitivities of the book trade and how to survive them with your writerly self intact is Betsey Lerner's The Forest for the Trees.

But having said all that, I'm not sure I recommend how-to-write books for complete beginners at all. Certainly not the more prescriptive sort, because at the beginning you should be focussing on process, not product. By all means use Dorothea Brande to get you going, but don't go near John Gardner, for example, till you've done enough writing (a novel or two?) to be in a position to argue with him, rather than meekly doing what he says. If you want to learn to write your best book, then you need to know what your writing is by doing lots of it first, and then when you go looking for advice, you'll be better placed to accept it, adapt it, or ignore it.

Same goes for writing courses, on the whole.

I have to say it - I just have to: there are no books that will teach you how to write!

That pretty much sums it up. There are literally hundreds that may claim to, but none that actually will. Writing comes from within, from the core of your own self. The most effective way to learn plotting, structure, development, etc is to read novels - learn from the true professionals, because (and let's be brutally honest here) if all these self-styled literary gurus were any good at what they try to impart, then they'd be actually writing themselves. Remember the old adage: those who can, do; those who can't, teach!
The only truly informative elements such books carry are their advice about approaching agents/editors/publishers, and you can get all that information from the Writer's & Artists Yearbook.

I must take issue with issur on this.

The best writers probably are born, not made, soaking up their technique by some form of osmosis. It's unlikely there were creative writing classes in the time of Shakespeare, for example. For the rest of us, I believe many aspects of writing can be and are taught. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear but you must be able to teach basic techniques - to say otherwise makes a mockery of all the books written on the subject, not to mention the creative writing courses and those who give them. I think you'll find that the authors of many, if not all, the "advice books" are established authors in their own right. Jack Bickham, the author of the book I mention above, published over 70 fiction books before his death. Francine Prose, mentioned in Emma's post  above, is also a well established author; I have found her "advice book" excellent. I cannot speak for the others mentioned as I am not familiar with them but I would be willing to bet they are, or were, established fiction writers.

To say that writing cannot be taught implies that you can accept no advice on your efforts but must soldier on in the hope that, eventually, it all falls into place. Personally I would rather try and cut a few corners.
AS

Yes, and it depends what you think a 'how to write' book is there to do. I first read a slew of them when I was on my second novel - the first one wrote itself without much difficulty. Come number two, and I found that I needed craft to come to my aid. I didn't read any of these books to absorb rules but to engage with them - to disagree, gain insight, have an argument, broaden my understanding.

Oh, and as it happens, Shakespeare would certainly have had creative writing classes. They'd have been called the study of rhetoric, but that was a huge deal then. And if his education had been at all classy or complete, he'd have been writing verse in Latin and Greek and having that exposed to criticism - if that's not workshopping, what is?

The one that shines out for me, is "Word Painting" by Rebecca McClanahan published by Reader's Digest. This is a glorious book, a pleasure to read in itself for its exquisite prose alone, never mind the richness of the sensory world of writing that she invokes. I read it very slowly, some years ago - not slowly because it was dull, but slowly because there was so much to take in, so many thoughts stirred, so many times when I put the book down with a revelation - "yes, I see".
It is packed with topics, discussion, exercises, examples on bringing characters to life, on show don't tell, on point of view, on plotting and pacing. I was sorry when it ended and am certain it has enhanced my own writing.
Ten stars from me for this one.
Click on this link and I hope you'll see what I mean - the opening sentence in the Introduction alone is quoted thus on Amazon: "If I were fully conscious of my surroundings at this moment, I would describe the light through the miniblinds, the way it searches out the..." and this is followed by a "more" link - click on that and I hope you'll see what I mean.

Whisks

Of those I've encountered the only one I intend to read again - several times I expect - is Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V Swain.  I stopped reading 'how to write' books after finding this.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm going to upset a lot of people here, but I'm going to say it anyway: I HATE Shakespeare! Like Picasso, he is a classic example of someone considered 'genius' through the good fortune of being dead. I'm sure he was considered good in his day, but then so were 8-track tapes until something decent came along.
But i digress. My point was that good advice is readily available in the W&AY and the plethora of self-help manuals are nothing more than cynical attempts to cash in on the insecurities of the aspiring author - and we're insecure enough!
I'm not saying that a writer is born - though certainly some have more imagination than others & are more adapt at expressing this. Rather I am saying that anything that needs to be learned can be gleaned by simply reading the work of others. If you don't read, you'll never be able to write, natural talent or no.

If you don't read, you'll never be able to write, natural talent or no.

Of course. Which is why I started my post with a slew of how-to-read books. You'd be amazed how many people tell me that they'd love to write a book, and when I ask what they like reading, they say they don't have time. Or that they're afraid that their style might be affected (they should be so lucky). I've never been sure if it's arrogance, or ignorance of what becoming a craftsman/artist actually takes. Unfortunately, when they finish writing their novel I also get asked to write editorial reports on them...

The weird thing is, I also see MSS by people who obviously do read, but you'd never guess it from the prose: they must read, but they've clearly absorbed nothing: it's a different kind of reading. But none of us see everything in a book, and a good article about it, or good class exploring it, can open our eyes to all sorts of things. That's teaching.

Writers, like all artists, have always sought out help and teaching from other and older artists: before the internet there was the penny post, the district messenger, the salon, the Inns of Court, the moment with a tutor after a seminar, Craiglockhart, the peripatoi... Both through formal education - rhetoric, as Harry says, and the word-sensitivity which you develop in translating to and from Latin and Greek of increasing sophistication - and through informal contacts, writers learn, teach themselves, teach others, whatever you want to call it.

Writing can be taught - directly by a teacher or indirectly by a book - to the same extent as painting or writing music can be taught: a lot in some ways, and not at all in others. We can teach craft and technique, and we can show ways to get at the material for that craft to work on, and then ways to work it. We can help people to understand their writerly selves and how the book trade works: we can help them to read better. In the end we can't make them more of a writer than they're wired to be, but we can make them a better writer than they are at the moment. Their limitations will always be how their mind works, and how they see the world, but we can help them to be the best writer they're capable of being.

Of course a really determined and talented person can do all these themselves - probably. Seeking out formal teaching may be a fast track rather than an essential process, but I doubt if there's a decent writer on the planet who hasn't sought out help of some kind. Among the aspiring writers I see, it's not talent that's the big marker of who will succeed, it's persistence, and a huge, endless appetite for learning from all sources: however confident they are in their talent-in-waiting, they are utterly humble in their willingness to be taught by the right person.

I want to agree with your opening statement Emma and I've always believed it to be true - except I watch my teenage son who never reads books - although he does read copious non-fiction on the internet (usually politics) and the thing is he can write. Whether he'll ever finish a novel I grant you I don't know, and his grammar sometimes takes some tweaking - but I've worked with many professional writers who needed more editing. He watches TV with a director's eye and a great ear for dialogue and then he plans his scenes as though it's screenplay with commentary - and it works, at least for the kind of novel he wants to write. I've spent his whole childhood lecturing him about reading to no avail and now he's got a fab vocabulary, a great eye for detail and great characters and arcs.

Louise, I think there's an awful lot of how-to-write you can learn from other media and forms. You can certainly train your ear for sound and rhythm, for balance (or off-balance) and structure, not to mention grammar, syntax and vocabulary, on well-written non-fiction, and then put it to use on fiction: I'm always amazed how many novelists-in-training say they don't read non-fiction. (I'm also amazed when people who want to write say 'Why on earth would you ever read a book twice?', but that's another story.) And yes, fiction has huge amounts in common with film/TV (my first degree was Drama, and in many ways it's been far more useful to me, and less daunting, than a Literature degree might have been. I did my fiction-reading on the side). Structure, dialogue, character, as you say, detail... First, I think the revealing thing is here:

"it works, at least for the kind of novel he wants to write."

He's obviously very talented, and has found the kind of fiction which can make the most of his experience of narrative in other forms: it's so common, in boys particularly, to find that reading books is just too much sitting down and keeping still and thinking inwards. Looking forward ten years, I'd love to see if he does take to reading fiction...

The problem is when people try to write a kind of novel they're not equipped for, either because they don't read them, or because they do but have absorbed nothing. (I once did a report on a novel which had no dialogue. Truly: all speech was reported: "and then she asked him if she could go home, and then he told her that she mustn't but could go to the park...". There was lots else wrong with the novel, but I did wonder how the writer could have not noticed that fiction tends to contain dialogue. Certainly the kind of commercial women's fiction that it was does...)

And if a writer has been chiefly equipped by non-novel things, that may exclude the main things which novels do and no other narrative form does: consciousness; the integration of the different discourses - the characters', the writer's, the world in which the book's written; the absolute elasticity of the time-span of the reading... Film/TV, on the other hand, has visuals, sound, simultaneity, which novels don't. But it can't give access to consciousness.

So although the intersection of film/TV and fiction is large, the things they don't share are, arguably, the things which are most essential to their medium (I think that's a circular argument, but it's still true). And in the long-term, that's going to limit the writer drastically in what they can achieve. It's like being an artist and always using paint straight from the tube and never mixing it on a palette, nor on the canvas. You can do a lot, but you're denying the inherent mixability of paint and so cutting yourself off from both colours and composition/structure/expression that using that mixability would allow you.

Emma

When writing grabbed me, I didn't read any 'how to...' books, but I did read a lot about story and the nature of narrative. I wanted to be sure that it was the right medium for me. I was already into storytelling, painting and music in a big way, and at first writing felt like a distraction. Then I read a whole pile of novels in the same general area in which I wished to write. And I changed my mind: I didn't want to write anything at all like those books. I began to find my own style.

I agree with what you say Emma. I find it hard to distinguish the role of reading for myself as writer because I have simply always done both. As soon as I could read I was making up stories and they are not really separable. I haven't had to research my genre because I already read it for fun.

Debra Dixon's Goal, Motivation, Conflict was a lightbulber for me.

Hilary Mantel recommends Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande

Hilary Mantel recommends Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm ...nuff said.

'How to Write a Blockbuster' is a very good basics book. I go back to it often. It's particularly good for children's writers.

'The First Five Pages' by Noah Lukeman is good but the sequel 'The Plot Thickens' I didn't find as useful. Actually, if I am completely honest, the free advice offered on the Writer's Workshop website is as good as anything. It's pithy, funny, well-written and, best of all, brief. The only trick is that you have to believe it 'cos it's all true. Then it's a matter of writing and writing and writing because it seems that the more you write, the better you get. Oh, and reading is god as well because, even if you don't read critically (ie, you simpl enjoy reading), you seem to learn by osmosis. So, it comes down to reading and writing or writing and reading.

I tried several and couldn't get into them.

I'm not sure if it's in print, but there's an anthology of essays called How to write science fiction, fantasy and horror, edited by J N Williamson. It's got articles from the likes of Ray Bradbury, Dead Koontz, PEter Straub and the like, and was the first how-to book I ever read. Highly reccomended for any sort of writing - good writing is good writing, after all.

I nearly forgot.