WP ate the final version of this, so I’ve reconstructed it as best I could. I apologize for not catching the mess!
The topic came up over the weekend, and it has been a while since we had a list-o-books post for new-ish writers. These are not for absolute beginners. If you have never written before, then read fiction that you like, and nibble some that you don’t like as well. Why? So you can get a sense of what genres are, and what separates, oh, hard and soft sci-fi, or what sort of style you enjoy and what falls flat (even though it is beautiful word play). Then write. Write a lot. Write scenes, descriptions, dialogue, stories short and longer. Read and write.
THEN, go back and start reading books about craft.
Swain, Dwight. This is a great place to start for how to pace a story, how to build tension-release-tension-release into a story. That’s not all, but that’s the area I tend to go back and re-read every year or so. It is for people who want to sell stories, so he focuses on commercial genres instead of literature.
Card, Orson Scott. Characterization. How do you sketch a character, either lead, or supporting, or “wanders through scene and never appears again?” Card also talks about points of view in the sense of first, and the various kinds of third person. Unless you are writing a Twist-a-Plot or Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story, skip second. [Maybe LitRPG? No idea since I don’t read a lot of those.] He includes good examples and horrible warnings, and is very readable and usable. I go back to this one every so often, just to see if I’m developing tics.
Card, Orson Scott. A Writer’s Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy. Are you doing sci-fi or fantasy? How can you and the reader tell? Again, here’s a Card book about the genres and how to separate the two. Unless you are writing the blended literary genre of Speculative Fiction, and are really, really clear about it (or your name is China Mieville or Margaret Atwood), Card shows you how to help the reader catch on . And yes, there are areas where it can slip from one to the other – he helps lock that down, so you can keep your readers from walling the book and leaving one-star reviews. As with all his how-to books, he writes very well, and doesn’t talk down to the reader.
Farland, Dave. Writing Wonder. This is aimed at fantasy, but applies to everyone in some ways. He’s looking at one emotion in particular, the sense of excitement and mystery that most people have as kids, and that is an element in some popular books (and literature, for that matter). How to pin it down and incorporate more of it is what he’s suggesting, with some ideas and useful approaches. His book Million Dollar Outlines is aimed at “plotters,” but can help those of us who are more free-form in our story building as well. I have not reread it recently, because I tend to break outlines.
Some people like William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. I didn’t find it as useful as others seem to.
Hoyt, Sarah. May You Write Interesting Books. This is a relatively short, concise guide to adding adventure and entertainment to your stories. If outside readers murmur about “nothing’s happening,” this may help you find out why, or what they are not seeing.
I also have a few thesauruses (thesauri?) for writers, often because I develop tics and need to find other words for [tic-of-the-month]. Plus it is fun to glance through and see if there is a better word, or more apt, or just cool for your character.
Not every book works for everyone, so nibble, sample, and find what helps you the most! There are also genre guides that some people find great, and others are less thrilled about. Read, read, and read more, and again, find your personal “best books.”
Mad Genius Club 
7 responses to “Books for Almost-Beginning Writers”
I found Swain through Deborah Chester who taught Jim Butcher, by the process of asking who taught before her, Bickham, and working my way back through history to the source.
I did something similar, starting with Bell then back to Bickham then back to Swain (although I’ve only read Swain’s characters book, not the more famous one yet).
It was Bickham’s explanation of scene-sequel technique (aka action-reaction beats) that really started to gel things for me.
Was there supposed to be more to this?
And why has WP messed up the comment box? Do they want to drive everyone to Substack?
I have no idea about the comment box. It seems to vary from user to user. It might be browser specific, or it might not. I can’t log in at all from my older computer.
It does look as though the post was messed up somehow. It looks unfinished.
It looks better now.
From what I can tell, LitRPG seems to be largely third and first person, like everything else. The ones I’ve read from TxRed’s list were mostly entertaining reads as well as informative, except for Swain, who alternates between kind of dry, and doing that exhaustingly cheerful Norman Vincent Peale thing.
In addition to the books mentioned here, I like Chris Fox’s Plot Gardening, and Rachel Aaron’s 2K to 10K, which is theoretically about productivity but makes some good points about how productivity is dependent on how much you understand, and care about, the specific piece of the book you’re attempting to write. If you’re short on time/money, here’s Aaron’s essay that started it all: http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html
If you’re wired a certain way, you may also get something from books about famous writers’ story development processes. The ones I found interesting were:
-History of the Lord of the Rings (Return of the Shadow, Treason of Isengard, War of the Ring): This is a subset (books 6-8) of the History of Middle Earth series. Tolkien’s tendency to write out multiple false starts can be exhausting, but if you can get hold of print copies through your library system, it’s easy to skim to Christopher Tolkien’s notes, see if anything interesting changed in the draft you just skipped, and then jump back to look at the draft in more detail.
-Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: this can be a bit arcane, especially if you don’t have most of her books memorized (I first read it at a time when her books were still fresh in my mind), but if you have the end result novels close at hand, it’s interesting to go from a given novel to her sketchy ideas for a plot twist or her observations of a memorable RL person.