3 Reliable Resources for Any Writer

I know a lot of writers who, when reflecting on their writing, ask themselves, "well, how do I know if I'm writing well?" It's always a great idea to be reflective and introspective about what you are and aren't doing in your writing to keep getting better, but sometimes a self-assessment isn't the best guide.

I always wanted to write, and I tried writing stories when I was an angst-ridden teen in high school, but your teens just isn't the time to really focus on the writing craft. Like many of my students, high school is a time for developing ideas and content in non-fiction expository texts (research papers and reflections on other literary texts), technical texts, and the ever-pervasive persuasive writing they obsess over in speech and debate classes. Having gone through the same high school rigmarole, there were very little opportunities (by opportunities I mean assigned study from one of our instructors) to develop creative fiction and non-fiction writing samples. To that end, it wasn't until I got to college and enrolled in various creative writing classes that I even dabbled in the kind of serious fiction writing I aspire to write nowadays.

If you are a writer and had relatively limited opportunities for fiction writing in the high school classroom and feel that you are too far behind to get into the craft, then I beg you to start now, it's never too late! If you think you have a good idea for a great story or book, I'd like to impress upon you a few resources that I found to be advantageous, and (could I go so far as to say) essential for getting me into a frame of mind and capacity to even have a chance at being a writer today. If you are a serious--or even semi-serious--writer, you may already have some wonderful resources, or you may already have read through these and use them already. I am only going to mention the three I've chosen to start with because I feel out of the many books on writing that I have read, they do just that: they get you started, and I can honestly say that these three books helped me develop my palette for the type of literature I like to read and write, but also subconsciously helped me develop content and format for several stories ideas; stories that eventually, over several years of minor editing or moderate re-working, went on to be accepted and published by professional literary publications. Take a look at the list and consider adding these to your writing resource library:

1. Rust Hill's Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular.

This book is an absolute TREASURE to me in that it finally began corroborating just how fiction stories WORK. It is a thoughtful and insightful look at all the elements of fiction writing: idea/premise development, story structure, characterization, setting, conflict, foreshadowing/ flashback, and building suspense to name a few. I have the book at my side as I write this, and I'm laughing and smiling as I flip through the pages and see the highlights and notes I made in this book. This book was a required "text book" or my English 301 (fiction writing) class with Dr. Spilman and I have held on to it ever since. It's not overly verbose--197 pages including an afterword--and is jammed-packed with excellent insight into writing fiction.

2. Stephen Minot's Three Genres: The Writing of Literary Prose, Poems, and Plays.

Although this book is packed away in a box right now, I spent an entire semester poring through this book and I'm pretty sure I read just about every page of it. This book is pretty valuable because Minot spent time showing how particular literary devices worked and how the effect was achieved.

To that end, the author even includes a short-story that he wrote and discussed the pros and cons of it relative to the ideas and suggestions he made in the book. Minot's approach is definitely different for an instructional book--particularly one about a craft with such subjectivity as creative writing, and I appreciated his honest analysis of his own work. The story, entitled "Sausage and Beer " if I remember correctly, was actually pretty good.

It also emphasized the must-dos and must-dont's of not only fiction writing, but the other two genres: poetry and non-fiction. It helped me somewhat in my poetry writing class as well, but we can discuss that some other time. This book is also sentimental to me to an extent because it was the book required for English 285Q, Intro to Creative Writing, the first class I took with my favorite professor, Phil Schneider.

3. Stephen Greenblatt's The Norton Anthology of English Literature (any version/volume).

Although this is a little unfair because it is an anthology, this list was a recommendation for writing resources, and what better resource than a collection of the best poems, non-fiction, fiction, and drama in the history of the English language. Although this anthology is reprinted from time-to-time in a series of ix volumes of literature, any volume of the anthology is definitely great reading across twenty-five hundred years of quality literature from Aeschylus (my favorite of the Greek tifecta of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and that discourse is again, for another blog post) all the way to the post-post-modern or meta-modernism (which is what we call our current literary era.) I have three volumes of this anthology, all of which are about 1800 pages or so. I have a Renaissance lit collection from about 1582 to about 1630 (English Civil War), an early-American lit anthology which runs from about 1680 (fellows like the ever-so-righteous Cotton Mather and the like) to my all-time favorite Washington Irving, an American Romanticism/Realism anthology (including my favorite fellas Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe), and the final volume from about 1850 to 1975 where those modernists and post-modernists fall.

Back to the point of the blog, the REASON I bring these up is they provide you with the very best in literature to pore over in order for it to make an impression (subconsciously, of course) on your own writing. Pretty much every piece of literature of any merit ever written in the English language can be found in one volume or another of these anthologies and reading as much of the literature as you can will only enhance your own edification, but hopefully, your writing as well. I suggest you pick just one of them that cover the eras you are most-interested in and go from there.

Anyway, I think these three books have really helped give me a broad appreciation of English literature across a number of writing periods, and provided good guidelines to follow for the type of writing that I like to do. If you really wanted me to narrow it down to get the most bang for your buck to help improve your writing, I'd go with Rust Hills's book. I can't stress enough how great of a resource it is. Please let me know some of the resources you used to get started writing.

Cheers,

Scott