Books on Writing

A few books on my shelf. I think of them as my writing support group:

Chapter after Chapter by Heather Sellers
“Writing a book is exactly like love. You don’t hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn’t work out, you’re heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to. You don’t hold some of yourself in reserve. It’s all or nothing. There are no guarantees. ” 

Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life by Natalie Goldberg
“Let some of the good writing go. Don’t worry. There’ll be lots of it over time. You can’t use all of it. Be generous and allow some of it to lie fallow. What a relief! We can write well and let it go.”

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender
“You might want to write Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” inside the front cover of your journal as a reminder of the value of solitude, both the solitude in which the world springs forward into your senses and the solitude in which you recollect the happening.”

Courage and Craft by Barbara Abercrombie
“You have a deep well inside you filled with memories, thoughts, feelings, fantasies, observations. You have everything necessary for your writing. Now you just need to get our of your own way and avoid curbs. 

Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger
“Write against patterns. Go against the devils. Write what you never write. Lie. Validate what you don’t validate. Indulge what you don’t like. Wallow in it. Write the opposite of what you always write, think, speak. Do everything against the grain!” 

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
“I write because I am alone and move through the world alone. No one will know what has passed through me… I write because there are stories that people have forgotten to tell, because I am a woman trying to stand up in my life… I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay; how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only real home I’ll ever have.”

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
“E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.”

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

Leaving a Trace by Alexandra Johnson
“It took years of keeping journals to trust a simple fact: like life in transit, the writing inside is often fragmented, messy.”

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
“Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.” 

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath
“I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love’s not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time…”

Page after Page by Heather Sellers
“Writing is a ton of work. It’s exhausting. You can hardly do it when you are tired – it’s that hard to do well. It’s a way of life, and you have to really hard inside yourself. It’s like cleaning house – fun to have finished, less fun to do. Writing is not always the answer. It’s not always right to say to people: “Yes, you have a great story. You should write it.” Maybe you should write. Maybe not. Are your friends telling you to write? Do they know what’s involved with that? Are you feeling you should write? Why? You don’t have to write.”