Best Books About Writing: Essential Reading List for Writers

Every writer who has written about writing has produced their own version of the same advice: read constantly, write regularly, cut what isn’t necessary, ignore the inner critic until the draft is done, then edit mercilessly. The specific formulations vary; the underlying truth doesn’t.

What distinguishes the best books about writing from the generic is the angle of approach: the memoir that shows how a writer actually developed, the specific exercise that unlocks something that was blocked, the philosophical argument about why creative work matters. The books below are the ones that have actually helped writers — not inspired them to want to write, which is the lesser gift, but enabled them to do it.

The Essential Books

Bird by Bird — Anne Lamott (1994)

The most widely loved book about writing. Lamott is funny, honest about the depression and self-doubt that writing involves, and organised around practical wisdom rather than inspirational abstraction. Her central advice: take it “bird by bird” — one small section at a time — when the whole seems impossible. Her chapter on the “shitty first draft” (give yourself permission to write badly on the first pass, because bad first drafts are the raw material of good final drafts) has helped more writers through the psychological barrier of beginning than any other single piece of advice.

The book is half craft advice and half memoir, and neither half suffers from the other’s presence. Essential.

The War of Art — Steven Pressfield (2002)

Not a craft book but a philosophical one: an analysis of what prevents creative work (Resistance) and how to overcome it. Pressfield’s argument is that Resistance is universal, predictable, and intelligible — it operates most powerfully against the work that matters most, which is how you identify what you should be doing. The professional overcomes Resistance not by eliminating it (it never goes away) but by showing up and doing the work anyway.

Short, intense, and organised as a sequence of short observations rather than chapters. Read it quickly; the effect is cumulative.

Big Magic — Elizabeth Gilbert (2015)

Gilbert’s book is about creative living rather than craft technique: the argument that ideas are looking for human partners, that creativity is a transaction between the human and the mysterious, and that the worst thing you can do is wait until conditions are perfect to begin. Less specific than Lamott but more encouraging for writers who are stuck at the level of permission — who have not yet given themselves the right to try.

For many writers, Big Magic is the book that unlocks the beginning; Bird by Bird is the book that gets them through the middle.

Craft and Technique

On Writing — Stephen King (2000)

The most acclaimed book about fiction craft by a working novelist. The first half is memoir — King’s difficult childhood, his years of rejection, his alcohol and drug problems that threatened to derail his career, and his recovery. The second half is craft: read constantly, write every day, cut the adverbs, trust your reader, and never use a passive voice when an active one is available. The advice is Strunk-and-White basic, but King’s authority as a writer who has produced millions of words gives it credibility that a writing teacher’s advice might lack.

Famously: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

The Elements of Style — William Strunk and E.B. White (1959)

Under 100 pages, first published in 1918, and still the most authoritative guide to English prose style available. Strunk’s rules — omit needless words, prefer the specific to the general, use the active voice — are not negotiable in the sense that violating them always weakens prose. The rules can be broken with intention; the writers who break them best are those who know them most thoroughly.

Required reading for anyone who writes in English.

Memoir and the Writer’s Life

A Moveable Feast — Ernest Hemingway (1964)

Hemingway’s memoir of Paris in the 1920s — his friendships with Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and others — is the most literary of the writer’s-life memoirs. It is also not reliable biography (Hemingway wrote it late in life with old grudges and old self-mythologisations intact). But as a description of how a writer develops — the specific habits, the attention to craft, the economy of means that he was teaching himself — it is without equal.

Becoming a Writer — Dorothea Brande (1934)

The oldest book on this list, and among the most useful. Brande’s insight — that the writer needs to establish a relationship between two different kinds of consciousness, the unconscious generative mind that produces raw material and the critical conscious mind that shapes it — anticipated modern psychology of creativity by decades. Her practical exercises (writing immediately upon waking, committing to a specific time and place and quantity of writing) remain as useful as anything published since.

Reading Order

Start here: Bird by Bird → The War of Art. These two books address the two main problems: how to do the work and how to overcome the resistance to doing it.

Add craft: On Writing → The Elements of Style.

For creative philosophy: Big Magic → Bird by Bird.

The library: Becoming a Writer → Bird by Bird → The War of Art → On Writing → Big Magic → A Moveable Feast. This is a comprehensive writing education in six books.