Books like On Writers And Writing

I love that Bird by Bird doesn’t read like a reference book.

Lamott’s words feel personal. The book is personal to me because my daughter gave me her college copy of Bird by Bird when I began my writing journey. Lamott’s plain, honest, and affirming words, like first drafts are “shitty” and “writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop,” resonate with me. Bravo to Lamott for this great metaphor!

Writing can be solitary, but Lamott reminds us we’re not alone. So, I heeded her words. I joined the party and became an active literary citizen. It’s there that we writers find our people, supporters, and dear friends.

Talking of voice, finding your writer’s voice lies in the confidence that comes from effort and application. Alvarez was a poet, writer, critic, and poetry editor at The Observer newspaper in the 1960s, where he nourished the writing of Sylvia Plath and others. When you think of your favourite writers it’s usually their voice that grabs and sustains interest and trying to figure out your own, as a writer, can take time. Playing with other voices, trying them on for size, making one your own, is something Alvarez explores through his own insights about the work of Plath, Yeats, Jean Rhys, Freud, and others.

“It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see.” So begins the poet Doty’s short book on the art of description. The art of something implies subtlety and skill, and Doty explores ideas around uncertainty, figuration, attentiveness, and those habits of conscious observation and specificity that improve description. If this sounds dull it is not, because there’s a subjectivity about Doty’s own prose that draws you in. What’s more (and I’m going to cheat a little here) if it turns out that you love Doty’s prose as I do, there’s another book by him, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon about the painting by Jan Davidz de Heem on view at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, that will enchant you further.

Even if you don’t want to be a poet, there’s something about playing with poetic form that I think is useful to any writer because it enables you to explore the use of rhythm, metaphor, simile and other ways of honing your consciousness into literary and written form. It demands specificity of description and uniqueness of voice, and Kate Clanchy’s book - she is herself a published poet, writer but also a teacher - gets to the nub of it through examples and exercise, to emerge a more fluent and confident writer, and in whichever form you choose.

Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing, is brutally honest, deftly observant, and at times frighteningly visceral.

The skill with which he brings a bad ear appointment or the eating of too many eggs to life is a reminder to me that to be a writer doesn’t mean to live as a celebrity. It means to take the mundane pieces of an ordinary life and invest them with purpose and excitement.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book because it allowed me to look at my life, at my weird relationship with eggs, and my tendency to sing out loud in shopping malls, as the very essence of my next story.

Equally compelling were the snippets of writing advice layered into King’s story, another reminder that advice, as well as inspiration, can be found just about anywhere. 

I came across Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing at a time when I believed writing to be an impossible, nay, mythical career. Like the imaginary friends from my childhood, I saw it as something I must snap out of if I was ever to find the real thing.

I loved Shapiro’s part-memoir, part-guidebook because she spoke to the true mystery and unknowingness of writing. Clarity, as she puts it, may be the main aim of our game, but it seems to fall further and further away the more we try to grasp it.

The deceptively simple language and tone of Still Writing was a timely reminder for me that, despite the difficulty, risk, vulnerability, and tumult of this discipline, writing is an indelible part of my life, which is not only possible but within my reach. 

What I love about Lee Koffman’s intimate writing memoir is her encouragement and support of the notion that all writers have a different method and that you must find your own tips and tricks to get through the writing practice.

As a high-achieving student, thinker, and writer, I was mortified in classrooms to find that I didn’t have quick answers for things. With time, I came up with something great, but on the spot, I was an inarticulate, floundering mess.

Koffman taught me that truthfulness can not only be found in what you write but in how you do it. I learnt to accept the way my mind worked and realised that in combining the content and the method, you can create something great. 

“Long ago Virginia decreed, in the way that Virginia decrees, that I was the painter and she the writer.” Vanessa and Her Sister is a portrait of two extraordinary and unconventional women, Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. The story is told in the form of a diary kept by Vanessa, beginning at the turn of the 20th century with the formation of the Bloomsbury Group in London. Priya Parmar has created a sympathetic yet honest portrayal of Virginia Woolf, her genius and her often precarious mental state, and the impact it had on her family—in particular Vanessa, who was an important and steadying influence for her sister and a talented artist in her own right.

Capturing the spirit of Maya Angelou’s work, Renee Watson expertly chronicles Maya’s life with evocative poems. This book is a rhythmic tribute to the first Black person and the first woman to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration. Bryan Collier’s collage art perfectly complements each poem.

I especially love the poem called “Brother Jimmy, Brother Martin,” which highlights Maya’s deep love for James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.

My favorite lines: “Jimmy was light in the darkest of rooms. Martin was water in a parched desert.”   

I didn’t think I could appreciate this memoir of a son searching for his imprisoned father in Gaddafi’s Libya until, suddenly, I did. This book showed me that the bonds between all fathers and their sons transcend things like nationality and religion. It is part of the core of what it means to be human.

I knew from the very first pages that the author would never again see his father, even as he tirelessly spends most of his adult life trying to. By extension, I understood that as much as we want to, we can never really know our fathers.

I raced through the pages.