Learning a complex set of complex skills: craft books I recommend

When I decided to take up writing, I had a sense that I wanted to write a book that worked. One that had the plot, emotional hits, and quality but unobtrusive prose of the novels I enjoyed reading. I conceptualised learning to write as being similar to how I had learned to develop expertise in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as a Clinical Psychologist.

So I treated it like that. I made a list of core competences — the areas I’d need to improve if I wanted to write something worthy of a reader’s time. Plot, character, structure, pacing, prose, dialogue: all the pieces that go into building something good on the page.

Over the past few years, I’ve read a lot of books on writing. Some were helpful, some less so, and a few became favourites — the kind of books I returned to when writing my second book (and hopefully my third, and fourth, and so on).

Here are the ones I found most useful, grouped by the areas of craft they helped me understand.

Structure

Super Structure - James Scott Bell
Clear, straightforward, and practical. Bell breaks story down into manageable beats without being prescriptive or formulaic.

Character

The Art of Character – David Corbett
Corbett takes you beyond surface traits and worksheets to help you build characters who not only seem real in themselves but also serve a vital function in your story.

Inside Fictional Minds – Steph Carty
Stephanie is another Psychologist who writes, so brings in-depth psychological expertise to considering how characters think and behave (and why).

Dialogue

How to Write Dazzling Dialogue – James Scott Bell
Concise and highly usable.

Setting

A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting – Mary Buckham
I’m not a visual reader, and this book has helped me ensure I write setting both so that those who are visual can picture it, and also so that it can serve to heighten atmosphere and the story – sometimes acting as a character in its own right.

Prose

Sin and Syntax - Constance Hale
An accessible primer with concrete advice on rhythm, grammar, and word choice. Perfect if you want to sharpen your sentences without losing your voice. This might be controversial, but I think good quality prose should not just be considered the domain of literary fiction – the words are how we tell our stories. If you have clunky phrasing, to me that’s like having a singer with a bad voice sing your beautiful melody.

The Emotion Thesaurus - Angela Ackerman & Becca Puglisi
This isn’t a prose guide in the traditional sense, but a helpful reference tool for showing emotion through body language, thoughts, and visceral responses. Helpful when you are trying to find a different way, for the 10th time, to show a character’s anxiety!

Reading Like a Writer

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
The skill here is the same as the title. This book taught me how to read more attentively and analyse what works (or doesn’t) in other writers’ prose, characterisation, structure, and more. Many successful writers, such as Stephen King, recommend reading as a way to improve one’s own craft – this helps teach you how to get the most out of that.

Editing

Intuitive Editing - Tiffany Yates Martin
A compassionate and clear guide to self-editing, with contemporary references.

Scenes

How to Write That Scene - Rayne Hall
A short, punchy, how-to guide for structuring different types of scene.

Pacing

Fiction Pacing - Rayne Hall
A practical resource for managing pace — not just across a book, but within individual chapters and scenes. And this isn’t just about increasing the pacing – Hall recognises that a good book needs to have a rhythm.

Introductions

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain - George Saunders
A beautiful book about storytelling. It draws on short stories, but offers a range of sophisticated insights relevant to novel-writing about character, structure and more.

The Bestseller Code - Jodie Archer & Matthew L. Jockers
A different, data-based look at what makes certain books work. You don’t have to agree with all of it, but I found it helpful particularly for thinking about structure and rhythm. Their machine learning approach validates a lot of what previous writers such as Vonnegut have previously described about the ‘shape’ of stories.

Your Story Matters - Nikesh Shukla
A warm, accessible reminder that your story is valid and important, especially for writers from underrepresented backgrounds.

Missing in Action

I have yet to find resources I can wholeheartedly recommend for the following competence areas (although have learned from different courses and blogs). Do let me know if you have any!

-   Plot

-   Voice

-   Point of View

-   Openings

-   Endings

I hope some of these help you as you develop your own set of skills as a writer. Let me know how you get on!