Like most writers, I have been what you might call a professional level reader for most of my forty-six years. Recently, as I’ve treated my writing as a skill to be honed, to be perfected but never perfect, and as a source of income on a professional basis, more and more of that reading has gone into consuming books about the craft of writing, about the unique profession of creating original artistic work, and about how to build a life around such endeavors.

I first encountered Stephen King’s On Writing while training with the US Army after I graduated from the US Military Academy. I can imagine anyone who is reading this essay has already burned through that masterpiece more times than you can count, and I won’t recount it here on my list. (Maybe as an honorable mention if it has somehow flown under your radar for twenty years). What I will do instead is show you some of the books I have come across since my transition to writing full time, many of them newish, and one of them even older than On Writing. They represent the breadth of what is out there and collectively sit at the top of their collective sub-genres of craft books. These books aren’t merely guides on how to make your writing sing and spin a yarn that pulls your readers through to the very last word, but are, to a page, something deeper than that. These books tell the story of why and how we create. There is some rock-solid advice in all of them on how to write words more betterer, you betcha. But all of them delve into the life and existence of a writer, and in my experience, this will help set you on the path of continuous creation, rather than that of a mere scribbler of words for hire.

Inkstained: On Creativity, Writing, and Art by John Urbancik (2019, DarkFluidity)

Urbancik’s memoir-esque collection of essays brings together years’ worth of musings from this master of the short story. His “Inkstains” projects follow a prescription of writing a short story every single day. I’ll write that again: A whole short story. Every. Single Day. Urbancik has done this for periods of a week. A month. And several times, for an entire year (allowing himself a day a month to recover or do something else with his mind). He details his thoughts process along the way, shares several of the stories created as Inkstains, and opens his heart and mind to the reader. This book is a meditation focusing on the motivation to put words on paper every day, and how that can change your mindset as a writer, helping you build a sustainable practice so that you have a craft to hone. He challenges all of us to take up an Inkstains challenge, whether for a week or a year, and to commit to pushing your storytelling faster and farther through the intentional practice. I came away from this book with a new paradigm for my own writing, now considering it to be more akin to martial arts or wrestling, which in my own youth filled the space of daily practice and meditation both physical and emotional. Rather than the physical movement of my body, it is now an internal set of, a pattern of thought and action preparing my heart and mind to write. Next time I see John, I’ll tell him how profoundly this short book affected me.

 Scene and Structure by Jack Bickham (1993, Writer’s Digest Books)

Going to the opposite end of the spectrum, Scene and Structure might be the truest to traditional form “craft” book on this list. This one came as the top recommendation from my Horror Writers Association mentor (which, as an aside, is a wonderful program, and one that the SFWA also offers to emerging writers. Look into it!). Written in an unabashedly straightforward style, this text lays out how commercial fiction needs to be written if you want to sell it. On my first read I found it to be overly prescriptive in laying out what makes for an exceptional story, clearly explaining what a scene is, how to connect scenes with what Bickham calls sequels to build rising tension and control the pacing of a story. On my second read the prescriptive aspect fell away, and I have found it now to be a superb guidebook on the architecture of any story you might want to understand. All the pieces of fiction are laid bare, and I’ve applied Bickham’s tools to map out everything from a breakneck thriller like Josh Bazell’s Beat the Reaper to slower burn classics such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or my favorite book of all time, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. Bickham has helped me understand the fundamental skills used to tell a story that readers will want to read, how to write crisp action sequences, and how to bridge that action to the interior thoughts of a philosophical protagonist to control the pace of the story that I want to tell. Through practice, I have found there is nothing prescriptive at all about these things. While Bickham certainly offers suggestions for what will sell and what readers will want to keep reading, this book is a superb toolbox, remaining just as relevant today as it was in 1993 when he published it.

Writing in the Dark by Tim Waggoner (2020, Raw Dog Screaming Press)

Waggoner won a Bram Stoker Award in Non-fiction for this accessible textbook. As a writer and a teacher, the author has distilled decades of instruction, mentorship, and writing into this masterclass on how to discover and harness your own personal fears and use them to power your writing to the next level. WITD is primarily a sequence of practical exercises that pull you through your own fears and anxieties, and lays out how you can understand them, store them, and tap into them in your own writing. But he then goes a step farther with guidance for the horror writer (and really, for any writer who wants to introduce dread and tension into their story telling). Specific chapters deal with how to create new monsters that will grip your readers, how to avoid cliches and use tropes thoughtfully, and even take a dive into the most practical end of the business – how do you market and sell this stuff? Interspersed throughout the chapters are bonus sections wherein Waggoner has asked some of the most thoughtful and successful genre writers of the day about their own craft and what advice they have for emerging writers. He lays out their answers in a clear and straightforward manner, an added bonus to his already stellar presentation. Read this book, take the time to do the exercises, and you will find your own dark heart on the written page, with the resilience to do so more often and effectively.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey (Alfred A Knopf, 2021)

We come next to something that is again, not a technical craft book. This book, like a less-personal, centuries-old exposition of what we get in Inkstained, is as much about how to build a life of creating, as it is the act of creation itself. We are presented with the daily lives of a hundred fifty or so masters of their craft, from Benjamin Franklin to Victor Nabakov, Georgia O’Keefe to Anne Rice, and so many in between. Seeing the variety of their needs and particularities, it can become almost overwhelming to take it all in. Yet this book has given me the fortitude and mental/emotional endurance to experiment with my own routines to find a creative practice that works for my life, and arms me with plenty of historical examples that allow me to shore up my boundaries with others, to wall off my creative time, and ensure it is prioritized appropriately. Daily Rituals assures you that others have been here before you, and all of them have done it differently. But also, look closer, and you might find the things that they did the same. Maybe there is a path here you can follow, as well.

The Writing Life by Jeff Strand (2020, Independently Published)

This is as close as I’ll come to On Writing in my list. What we get here is a no-holds-barred memoir about how the world came to get the award-winning writer we know as Jeff Strand. Jeff holds nothing back about his transformation from an insurance actuary (or something like that) into an award-winning horror writer. Though this was published before he won his first Stoker, he does mention being beaten by every name you can think of in his first fistful of nominations. He digs deep into how to build a writing business to live off of, and how to deal with the negative repercussions of making such a transition. Of the several similar books by successful genre authors I’ve read, this one still clings to my mind the most, and is the easiest to read and engage with. Jeff’s voice shines through every anecdote, and every anecdote has a point to make about the titular subject matter, whether how to deal with the constant stream of rejections (that even the Jeff Strands of the world deal with), imposter syndrome, working with other writers, finding an agent, making mistakes, and perhaps most importantly, on not quitting. And that last bit sums it up. What sticks in my craw is how it took Jeff Strand fifteen years as a writer before he could quit that other day job and write full-time. Fifteen years. That is commitment, and commitment to the written word, to becoming a better storyteller, is what the life of a writer is all about.

There. Five wildly different books that together paint a picture of what I think is important to know about being a writer, how to be a better writer, and ensure that you maintain your humanity and humility while doing so. Writing is about so much more than funding your voice and honing your craft. It is a way of being human, and the most human thing we can do is tell one another stories, taking each other outside of the present into another time and place. It isn’t easy to do, gripping someone else and pulling them along with you into another realm of existence, and maintaining your own sanity while doing so. And even less easy to make a living at it. But these books can help you find your way along that path and make the path ahead just a tad bit clearer.

Read. Write. Be kind to one another.