On the craft of writing: Essential books for your TBR

Let’s continue talking about essential resources for writers. This time, I’ve compiled a list of books about writing that are the go-to recommended reading for newbies and aspiring authors.

Essential books about writing

Here’s a comprehensive list of books that are on my personal TBR. I’ve marked the ones I’ve already read, and I’ll expand this list as I discover more helpful titles. You can find more books like this here, but these are the ones I have my eye on.

1. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
2. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr.
3. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
4. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within by Natalie Goldberg
5. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
6. Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
7. Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne
8. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
9. Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder
10. The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
11. Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
12. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
13. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain
14. Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer by Roy Peter Clark
15. The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman
16. The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
17. Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
18. The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby
19. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
20. How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark
21. The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
22. The Chicago Manual of Style

I don’t think all of these are non-fiction. I basically just copied the books from that Goodreads link that were on my “want to read” shelf.

Another book that is also on the Goodreads list, but I personally don’t recommend, is The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri. This book bored the living hell out of me. I only tried reading it because one very annoying aspiring writer insisted that this is the essential book for all writers. He had a lot of interesting ideas. Like the one about how your first draft should be your only draft, and all the authors who claim to be discovery writers are actually lying. Fun stuff. We don’t talk anymore.

Have you read any of these? What else would you recommend?