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What is the most helpful book – or even top three books – you would most recommend to fiction writers to improve their craft?
—Lurking in the Shelves
Dear Lurking,
I don’t love books dedicated entirely to craft. I find some of them obscure and pedantic, and far too few of them cover the craft of making a book that helps people to write a page-turner. I prefer to learn from books I love, puzzling out how the writer did this, or that, to make me fall in love with a character or keep reading until the wee hours. But – grump – there are a few I reach for time and again. They are:
Scene and Structure, Jack M. Bickham. This one breaks down novels by scene. It illustrates what makes a scene work and how scenes work in tandem to keep a plot moving forward.
Story Genius, Lisa Cron. This one is all about the deep background you need to do on a character’s backstory before you can even think about crafting a plot.
Save the Cat, Blake Snyder. This one is technically about screenwriting. But it’ll help you to understand what makes stories work.
Here’s the thing about craft books, though – someone out there is always breaking the rules. And this is a good thing. It’s just that you need to understand what the rules are in the first place before you go breaking them: Readers can tell the difference between someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing and someone who is artfully, craftily making a studied choice to do something new and deliberate. These are a good place to start. Let us know what you think of them.
Read on and carry a big highlighter,
—Gigi
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