Notes on How to Write a Novel: Anthology Contributors Actually Mention Writing and Share Some Books They've Learned From

One of my biggest pieces of “craft” advice is to be collaborative. Which I mean and think of both literally and loosely. Almost everything I read is, in one way or another, collaborating with what I am currently working on. Every time I borrow a writing move or strategy or whatever from a favorite book or author is a kind of collaborating. I also have a couple of writer friends who I show almost all my early drafts to, and where, as a younger writer, I could be stubborn or defensive about taking any kind of suggestion, fearing it might temper or weaken my own personal vision, I’ve learned over enough years how often work has been encouraged and gotten better via feedback and suggestions and collaborative brainstorming. Which is all to say, the entirety of How to Write a Novel felt like a kind of collaboration with each of the writers included, all toward this common goal, and when Abby Oswald mentioned that, “maybe it could be cool to put a list together of the anthology contributors' favorite craft books?” I immediately loved the idea and passed it on to all the other contributors. And so, below, as a kind of companion piece to our anthology of essays about writing that never mention writing, are some of our contributors actually mentioning writing and highlighting some books that taught us something about craft/writing.

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Katharine Coldiron on Plotto by William Wallace Cook

It's less a teaching book than a text version of those board books where you have the head of a giraffe, the body of an elephant, the legs of a camel, all put together to make a hideous animal monster. Or in this case, a hideous story monster. It's a hard book to explain, so I shall rely on its marketing text: "Because Plotto was written in the Twenties, its situations can seem old-fashioned and its terminology politically incorrect...[but] replacing 'stagecoach' with 'star ship' or 'dance hall girl' with 'male stripper' are within the reach of anyone using the Plotto system. In fact, this kind of substitution is how the book is intended to be used." A fun curiosity to have in your library, whether or not it ends up being useful to you.  

Tasha Coryell on The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood

When I was a teenager, I read Margaret Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman, multiple times. I was captivated by the book for several reasons. The first is that I read online that the publisher originally lost her manuscript, which delayed publication by a couple of years. I can no longer find a reference to this, so it’s possible that it never happened at all, but I was fascinated. Second, the novel goes from first person to third partway through. This blew my mind as a teenager and helped me realize all the tools at a writer’s disposal. Lastly, one of the characters professes feminist sensibilities that are later offset by homophobia. I was fascinated at how Atwood took a character that I related to and turned her into someone I hated. I think about that character a lot when contemplating the role of moralizing within fiction. 

Siân Griffiths on the five she’s kept

I am not a keeper of books. I find them new homes, let them live again in someone else’s mind. Besides, books are heavy, and I’ve moved too often. Yet I have five books that I’ve held on to: Mary Roach’s Stiff, Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk, Louise Erdrich’s Master Butcher Singer’s Club, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.

I almost didn’t buy the last because it centered on opera, and I didn’t think I cared about singing, but I flipped it open, read the first page, and promptly carried it to the register. Patchett’s passion for her characters and her subject made me care. More than that, it gave me permission to write about my own (dorky, embarrassing) obsessions and reframe them as distinct and interesting. As human. It challenged me to be brave enough to find the language to share what I love. 

Abby Harding on a few craft books

When it comes to writing novels, writers have to think on two levels: big and small. Keeping a story cohesive for 80k+ words doesn’t happen by accident, and there are some really great books out there to help you step back and “see the forest,” as it were. Some of my favorites include: Save the Cat Writes a Novel, Stephen King’s On Writing, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. To learn how to write beautiful sentences—the “small” of a novel—the best teachers are beautifully written books in your genre. Read them carefully, savoring and parsing the language, and then sprinkle what you learn into your own writing.

Hattie Hayes on All the Women in My Brain: And Other Concerns by Betty Gilpin

I read Betty Gilpin’s memoir-in-essays on the first night of a writing residency. It’s about acting and identity (and acting, naturally, often begets identity crisis). Gilpin loves her craft, even when it’s exhausting, especially when it’s exhausting. More than that, she loves the self it allows her to be. A bizarre self. A self who, within the first ten pages, “is giving birth to a knife.” The woman Betty Gilpin sees when she’s performing is similar to the person in the periphery of my self-concept, who only comes into view when I write. This book helped galvanize my understanding of where art belongs in my life. And it reminded me the realest version of myself — the one who loses people with mixed metaphors and overshares for the sake of being seen — is the one who deserves love the most.

Shane Kowalski on The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis is not a craft book per se, but this big orange thing really teaches you how to use everything around you: memories, encounters, happenstances, dreams, others’ work, grammar, form, syntax, existence, a single meaningless thought, history, etc. It’s the book I continually revisit to learn how to do something in writing. 

Kevin Maloney on Herzog on Herzog: Conversations with Paul Cronin

I don’t read craft books. I read books by and about artists who I think are fucking amazing. I’m more interested in how they think about and view life and their struggles to manifest their vision over many years than any nuts-and-bolts, technique-based ideas about how to write a novel. The act of writing… the work itself will teach you how to write if you’re in the right headspace and become friends with failure. As for Herzog, he’s batshit nuts. This book is a collection of interviews. In one of them he describes how during the filming of his first movie, Signs of Life, the Greek government revoked his filming permits. He replied that he would continue filming illegally and that he would be armed and that the first soldier who touched him would be shot dead. The military showed up to his set, but they were too scared to interfere and Herzog finished his movie. 

Kevin Maloney on Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh

There are about a thousand different collections of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo. I’m sure they’re all basically the same, but this is the one I read. In general, I’m a very fearful person. I grew up with an overbearing father. Some part of me always wants to fall in line and please people. But then I read about my favorite artists, and they’re the exact opposite, which makes me try to cultivate the opposite in myself. Van Gogh is the most fearless artist of all time, as far as I can tell. He tried about twenty careers and failed terribly at all of them. He even got fired from the priesthood because he took the job too literally and refused to live in the fancy house given to him by the church, and instead lived in a rundown shack among the people. As for his art—he pursued it relentlessly. It was his quest to find God. He kept failing and failing and failing and stuck with it anyway and everyone said he sucked. Then he died and everybody changed their minds.

Kevin Maloney on your favorite novel

I tweeted (X’d? Blueskied?) something about this recently. The gist is—if you want to learn how to write a novel, don’t read a book about how to write a novel. Go to your favorite novel, one that works on all levels, and figure out how it’s put together. Figure out its sentences and its larger structure and its voice. I did this with Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son when I was trying to learn short stories. I read it about a dozen times, and then I bought it on audiobook and listened to it every day on my drive to and from work. I lived in that book and saturated myself in its language. I typed out my favorite paragraphs just to see how they looked in a Word document. Somebody replied to my tweet along the lines of, “Doesn’t that get in the way of finding your voice?” But like… nobody has a voice in the beginning. You find your voice by imitating your heroes. Where you fail to copy the master will be where you find your own voice. This has always been true. Painters go to museums and copy the masters until one day—bloop—they start veering in a totally different direction.

Scott Mitchel May on an old theory text

I do everything ass-backwards. It’s a fact. I wanted to be a writer but was scared of making up things from whole cloth. It takes confidence to build and I am a breaker. So, I studied literature and literary criticism. For years I deconstructed stories, breaking them down and figuring out why they work or don’t. I analyzed. I learned by looking at the bricks as they came out of the wall, not by putting them in. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I was learning how to construct by learning how to analyze construction. But to analyze you need the words and definitions to put context to what you are seeing. I was given A Handbook to Literature in some literary theory class and I reference it all the time. Essentially, it is a dictionary of literary terms, ideas, and theories. When I want to be reminded that absurdism isn’t just that something absurd happened, I open it and read about how we are all on a journey from nothing to nothing. Then I write.     

Katie Darby Mullins on Succession, The Complete Scripts, Jesse Armstrong

Like so many, I fell in love with Succession, so I bought the scripts, hoping they would help me with dialogue. They definitely do: there are even clues as to what is too heavy-handed based on moments that didn’t make it to air.. What I learned, though, was that voice is what builds a universe. Despite having seen every episode, I found myself lost in the words nonetheless, especially the stage directions:

LOGAN

Where am I?

 Where are we? A prison cell? A maze?

 Where the fuck am I?…

 Our guy is in somewhere now, into the room he was seeking. Okay.

Everything is okay. He knows what he's doing now-

In allowing himself to question alongside characters, Armstrong discovers the story with the reader. I hope to bring delight at realization into all my writing (and that my characters have lines half as memorable as, “I’m the eldest boy!”).

Mitchell Nobis on comic strips

Like my piece in How to Write a Novel alludes to (kind of?), I've spent more time teaching others to improve their writing than I have working on my own. I've read a LOT of craft books—but from the teacher’s perspective. I like them all, really, because they help me think about what we're doing here, about why I love words and what they can do, but any ingrained understanding of narrative I have comes from reading Peanuts and Bloom County and Marvel superheroes. (Really, I less so read them than absorbed them.) Concise existential dread? Charlie Brown. Humor with analysis of contemporary bullshit? Bloom County. Reminders of our greater goals? Chris Claremont’s ‘80s X-Men and early Captain America. Three-act structure, hope, and hurt, and all done before you finished your morning cereal.

Abigail Oswald on Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami

In Novelist as Vocation, Haruki Murakami writes about the profound connection between author and reader. How you could pass each other on the street one day and never know that you’re both linked by this shared narrative. Literature can create a common ground between people who’ve never said a word to each other, and a writer can change the lives of people they’ve never even met. The whole book is wonderful, but that particular sentiment has really stuck with me ever since I read it.

e rathke on The New World by Terrence Malick

Terrence Malick evokes a very specific emotion in The New World when Colin Farrell’s hand grazes through the waist high grass while following after Q’orianka Kilcher’s Pocahontas. An immense sensation of longing swept through me, seizing my lungs. And it was this that I wanted to stretch across a hundred pages but didn’t know how until I stumbled across The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano and its dozens of narrators intersecting with Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. What struck me was how these two never give their own perspective but are instead invented and created by the impressions of all these others who barely knew them.

These two works unlocked what would become my first novel. A story of love and longing, of two hearts bound together and constructed by 26 strangers.

Amie Reilly on Meander, Spiral, Explode and two new inspirations

I worry a lot about taking up too much space, so I often return to Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode. Her book helps me understand the relationship between narrative structure and space, reminds me that my work can and should form lots of different shapes.

Mostly, though, I read and reread books by those who do what I want to do better than I’ll ever be able to. Right now I am surrounded by Claudia Rankine and Kate Zambreno. I keep them around the couch where I write. When I am stuck, I pull one out and open to a random page, read a little bit until something clicks. Sometimes I’ll read just one sentence and then I’ll write one of my own. This practice slows me down and forces me to be deliberate, to try for beauty and clarity in each thought.

Kirsten Reneau on Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard

“Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time,” so begins Annie Dillard’s Holy the Firm. In this book, Dillard’s god is one of marvelous beauty and deep brutality. She takes a deeply personal and internal struggle and weaves it across a larger question of god and god’s relationship to good and evil. Every time I read this book, I feel like I am inching my way to a larger understanding of what it means to write from the gut of it all.

Ellen Rhudy on Creative Quest by Questlove 

I’ve read a fair number of craft books, but the book I return to, the one that’s gotten me unstuck multiple times now, isn’t really a craft book at all. Creative Quest by Questlove is about broader ideas of inspiration and creativity. His thoughts on copying have been especially helpful, both to get myself writing again when I’m in a slump (because what could be easier than copying my own work?) and to unlock new perspectives on my writing. Every time I read Creative Quest I seem to walk away with a new favorite project: a Nancy Drew short story, or a sequel to my own ghost story that renders the first story more interesting, or a sequel to another short story that has, over the years, morphed into my current novel project. The way Questlove writes about creativity helps me lower the stakes of my own writing. He reminds me of the fun I get to have when I’m filling a blank page.

Donald Ryan on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

House of Leaves. Love it or hate it, I get it. I’ve only read it once. But that’s all it took for the question to stick: What is a book? Not just as a bound story but as a tangible object. As a visual medium. How fonts and formatting (and the color) of words can layer meaning onto the words written. Don Bronco’s (Working Title) Shell has this running through its veins. You’re reading, sure, but what are you seeing? It was fun to create a narrative like this. Fun like when I made pop-up books as a kid. So, while not as extreme as House of Leaves, no mirror is necessary, Don Bronco’s blue paragraphs pop off the page. But as far as craft books go, I read Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing recently. Enjoyed that one.

Emma Sloley on Jeanette Winterson

Every great novel is a craft book of sorts. I believe all writers have that formative reading moment; the I didn’t realize you could do that! moment. Mine was when I first discovered Jeanette Winterson. Her novels made me understand I needed to be a writer while also setting an impossibly high bar. The Passion and Written on the Body, especially, are what I think about when I think about voice. Her style is so acrobatic, switching from the poetic to the absurd, playing with syntax, flouting traditional narrative structure, and subverting expectations. (The unnamed, gender-unspecified narrator of Written on the Body was a radical device at the time.) No one writes interiority like her – this obsessive mapping of the human experience in all its sadness and yearning and squalor. She’s also wickedly funny. Her books seemed to issue an invitation: Here’s my map, now go out and find yours.