77 Books Like On Writers And Writing

What I love most about Bird by Bird is the way that Anne Lamott characterises writing as a gift, a giving over to someone else in a manner akin only to being a parent.

While I am not a parent, I am inspired by this idea that the written word can make a person braver and better by virtue of opening them up to the world and people in new ways. Despite the hurdles and difficulties of the practice, which Lamott deftly outlines, she ultimately decides that a writer is pursuing an act of generosity and openness. I really love this idea.

There is a real lack of pretentiousness to Lamott’s writing, which allows you to take these nuggets and accept what otherwise might be sentimental claims that “writing is life” as simple truths. 

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. 

Daphne has numerous elements that I particularly adore in a story: a classic writer as a character, an English manor house setting, and a mystery. Layer in a Brontë connection, and it’s a perfectly pleasing literary page-turner. In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is at her remote, seaside mansion in Cornwall, distracting herself from personal woes by researching a biography about Branwell Brontë, reprobate and possibly misunderstood brother of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Intertwined is a second storyline set in present-day London, as a lonely young woman, newly married to a mysterious older man seemingly still in thrall to his first wife, becomes caught up in a fifty-year-old mystery involving du Maurier and the Brontës. 

Kit and I share some life similarities, she’s a working-class girl with a Birmingham background, published later in life, and I was keen to read her story. Written as scenes from childhood with sharp observation and wit, her book illustrates an unpredictable childhood. The daughter of an Irish mother and Caribbean father in a large and sometimes chaotic family, where there is love in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not always at home. There are the familiar places, the family dynamics observed with the clarity of a child, and the tit-for-tat games her parents play - dad buys a new car, the next week, mum a harmonica and Davy Crockett hat. All quirks observed and challenging situations related with a lightness of touch and wit, a genuine pleasure to read.

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth… show more.