Books on how to write good

07 Oct, 2026

I've read over a hundred writing craft books. Writing craft is "how to write good". All the way from sentences to structure, marketing to reading. These are some of them.

If you don't care, that's fine. If you don't want to, that's fine. If you think structure is bullshit, that's fine. If you are happy with how you write, that's great! This isn't for you. This is a genre for people figuring it out. Like me. Like a lot of people.

It is extremely possible, reading a lot of this sort of book, to read the whole thing and come out with one useful note. Or none! This is still valuable, I find. Thinking about what advice I don't like - and why - is still very instructive. It still helps me think about what I do like, and want.

One of the notes I make in the list is that John Yorke's Into the Woods is one of my favourites despite the fact I actively dislike most of it. (Specifically, Into the Woods is very Freytag thus very Tragedy. I like the importance of the midpoint, the symmetry and fractals, the idea of going into the woods and finding the way back.)

This list has many omissions. Very noticeably: Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces or Christopher Vogler's The Writer’s Journey. That's right, I have not read the OGs, the cause of much of this trouble, the origin of the Hero's Journey.

Some of the books I count as writing craft are about reading. Not to get too close to Discourse, but personally, reading and writing are inextricable. For me, the better I am at reading the better my writing gets. Also I want to be able to read better, as its own thing.

I'm not going to list out all hundred-plus books but here is a lot of them, some with a necessarily tiny note. This endeavour has been going on since 2009, at least. The list is a bit broken up for ease of reading but take the divisions with a pinch of salt. I just pulled them out my behind. They are in no order.

Literary essays and author memoirs

1. Steering the Craft - Ursula K Le Guin. Plus Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (pdf)
2. Words Are My Matter - Ursula K Le Guin
3. Playing in the Dark - Toni Morrison. Actual literary criticism taken from her Princeton lectures
4. Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott. The shitty first draft
5. Zen in the Art of Writing - Ray Bradbury. Is wild and exciting and makes me want to write
6. On Writing - Stephen King
7. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
8. Aspects of the Novel - EM Forster
9. On Writers and Writing - Margaret Atwood
10. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years - Donald Miller

Plot, structure, outlining

11. Wired for Story - Lisa Cron
12. Story Genius - Lisa Cron
13. Into the Woods - John Yorke. One of my faves despite not liking much of it, as discussed above
14. Plot and Structure - James Scott Bell
15. Write Your Novel From the Middle - James Scott Bell
16. Outlining Your Novel - KM Weiland
17. Structuring Your Novel - KM Weiland
18. Save the Cat Writes a Novel - Jessica Brody. Everybody talks about Save the Cat so I figured Save the Cat should probably be read, if not followed
19. Take Off Your Pants - Libbie Hawker
20. The Story Grid - Shawn Coyne
21. Nail Your Novel - Roz Morris

Practical craft

22. Voice - James Scott Bell
23. How to Write Pulp Fiction - James Scott Bell
24. Romancing the Beat - Gwen Hayes. It's Save the Cat mapped onto romance
25. How to Plot Romance Fiction - Nina Harrington
26. Creating Character Arcs - KM Weiland
27. Writing the Breakout Novel - Donald Maass
28. Writing 21st Century Fiction - Donald Maass
29. How to Write a Novel - Joanna Penn
30. Write It All Down - Cathy Rentzenbrink
31. Write Away - Elizabeth George
32. What’s the Story? - Melissa Donovan
33. Back to Creative Writing School - Bridget Whelan
34. The Kick-Ass Writer - Chuck Wendig
35. Mugging the Muse - Holly Lisle
36. Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction - Jeff VanderMeer

Style and story theory

37. First You Write a Sentence - Joe Moran
38. On Writing Well - William Zinsser
39. The Elements of Style - William Strunk Jr & EB White
40. The Science of Storytelling - Will Storr
41. How Fiction Works - James Wood
42. How Novels Work - John Mullan
43. The Virgin's Promise - Kim Hudson. The virgin's promise is the ‘feminine’ reflection of the hero's journey. It's all Jungian archetypes from a different perspective
44. The Heroine's Journey - Gail Carriger
45. The Heroine’s Journey - Maureen Murdock
46. Meander, Spiral, Explode - Jane Alison. Alternative structures
47. Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird - Henry Lien. Eastern storytelling structures

Mindset and productivity

48. The War of Art - Steven Pressfield. The Resistance
49. Creative Confidence - Tom Kelley & David Kelley
50. The Artist’s Way - Julia Cameron. Morning pages
51. Never Say You Can't Survive - Charlie Jane Anders. ‘How to get through hard times by making up stories’
52. You Are An Author So Write Your Book Already - Matt Rudnitsky
53. Artisan Author - Johnny B Truant
54. No Plot? No Problem - Chris Baty
55. 2k to 10k - Rachel Aaron
56. 5,000 Words Per Hour - Chris Fox

Reading and research

57. Craft in the Real World - Matthew Salesses
58. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop - Felicia Rose Chavez. Permissioned opinions
59. How to Read Now - Elaine Castillo
60. Reading Like a Writer - Francine Prose
61. The Art of X-Ray Reading - Roy Peter Clark
62. In Praise of Reading and Fiction - Mario Vargas Llosa
63. How to Read a Book - Mortimer J Adler & Charles van Doren
64. Medieval Underpants and Other Blunders - Susanne Alleyn
65. What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank - Krista D Ball
66. So You Created a Wormhole - Phil Hornshaw & Nick Hurwitch

And finally, because a hundred isn't enough, here are some more I want to read.

1. Maps of the Imagination - Peter Turchi
2. Consider This - Chuck Palahniuk (rec by Zachary Kai)
3. Writing the Other - Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
4. Chinese Theories of Fiction - Ming Dong Gu
5. Tiger Writing - Gish Jen
6. Writing Without Teachers - Peter Elbow
7. The Anatomy of Story - John Truby
8. The Anatomy of Genres - John Truby
9. Writing Down the Bones - Natalie Goldberg
10. The Writing Life - Annie Dillard
11. The Art of Fiction - John Gardner
12. The Making of a Story - Alice LaPlante
13. The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers - Betsy Lerner
14. A Long Game - Elizabeth McCracken
15. The Art of the Novel - Milan Kundera