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10 Books on Writing and Creativity, from the Best Authors Ever to Put Pen to Paper
Matt Karamazov
November 19, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 30 minutes
It’s crunch time now: I just finished my 77th book of the year (this one), but if I don’t get my act together, I’ll break my streak of reading 100+ books a year for the last ten years!
I cannot let that happen!
I’ve got a pretty good idea of what I’m going to read next, and in my latest YouTube video I review seven of the books I’m MOST excited to read next.
But here today I’ve got 10 phenomenal books “on writing” to share with you, including one that I keep coming back to again and again. It might actually be one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and it’s full of fantastic writing advice.
Those books are all below.
And yes, I’m still working on my podcast episode with Steve Selengut, author of the great investing book, Retirement Money Secrets, and I’ll make sure you hear about it when it’s ready!
I’m shamefully late coming out with this episode, but learning about his unique, income-focused investment strategy is worth the wait. It could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to you, depending on when you get in the market. But now…
Tonight, Inside The Reading Life, We’ve Got:
We’ve got lots to learn today, so let’s hit the books!
“Say no to almost everything. This starts to free your time and mind.
Then, when you find something you're actually excited about, you'll have the space in your life to give it your full attention. You'll be able to take massive action, in a way that most people can't, because you cleared away your clutter in advance.
Saying no makes your yes more powerful."
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“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
This is one of the best-known books “on writing,” and it’s usually one of the first that I recommend, regardless of whether you’re a Stephen King fan or not.
On Writing is split into two halves, the first being more autobiographical, where we get a sense of how Stephen King developed into the young writer he became, as well as some of the formative experiences that contributed to his love of the written word. His mother was his very first fan, and every writer deserves to have a “first fan” like King’s mom!
The second half is more technical, where he raves about adverbs and editors - and of course reading, which activity is one of the most important, says King, for any writer to make time for in their schedule. The best writers, according to him, read a lot and write a lot. There’s really no substitute for either of them.
None of his advice is stuffy or staid, and the book is both hilarious and wise throughout. You get so much more than a passing glimpse into who he is, what made him, and what he overcame - specifically, a crippling drug and alcohol addiction, as well as being hit by a van, no less! There’s much more to him than you’d ever be able to get from his novels.
From beginning to end, you’re taken from his earliest days of discovering his love for the craft, through rejection after rejection after painful rejection, through the time where he was so fucked up on drugs and alcohol that he has no recollection of even writing Cujo, one of his most famous novels.
But he made it. In the end, he made it, and On Writing is a 320-page masterclass from one of the bestselling authors of all time, one I’ll keep returning to for as long as I still have something to say and still want others to hear it.
“The best art divides the audience. If everyone likes it, you probably haven’t gone far enough.”
Legendary music producer Rick Rubin has probably guided more of your favorite songs into existence than you realize, no matter whether you listen to country, rock, rap, metal, or anything in between.
Ever since co-founding Def Jam Recordings from his college dormitory in the 1980s, he's produced albums for Slayer, Adele, Jay-Z, Neil Young, Johnnie Cash, and a huge number of other artists that have very little in common other than the fact that they all record songs.
But being an artist isn't so much about what kind of art you make, or some particular volume of output, but rather it's about your relationship to the world and how much of it you can pick up through your senses. And how much of what you see you're able to pass on to your audience to help us see it too.
How much of an artist you are is directly dependent on how much awareness you can bring to your direct experience of life. The more aware you are, the more of an artist you are, and everyone can learn how to deepen their perception of their internal and external worlds. We can all be artists.
The Creative Act contains 78 philosophical "musings" on the nature of art and the laws of creativity, although most of those "laws" are more or less made to be broken. Really, the only law that Rubin says is "less breakable" than the others is the need for patience.
The fundamental idea behind much of his advice is that we are all artists, and each of us has something meaningful to contribute to the world, whether we're actively working to make it real or not. That's part of the magic that he often brought to the studio, and that's part of the magic he put into this book.
“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn.”
Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, and he’s influenced my own work tremendously, even as I’m writing this summary right now. I’m eliminating useless words, focusing on impact, and leaving some blanks for you to fill in yourself, among other things.
This particular book is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to become a more powerful, persuasive, prolific writer, and we’re even somewhat lucky to have a book like this. Hemingway always swore that it was unlucky to talk about writing, and so he never actually came out with a book about how to do it.
This particular volume was instead compiled from various sources: novels and stories, interviews, articles, and letters to editors, critics, friends, and fellow writers.
As it turns out, he did write about writing (quite a bit about writing, actually), and here we’ve got advice about improving in the craft, specific tips on work habits and discipline, what to look for (in your own writing and in the outside world), and different elements of the writer’s life that often go overlooked.
Ernest Hemingway on Writing is full of amazing passages and helpful advice, and I even found value in typing out his sentences myself.
It’s not quite the same as generating original thoughts, of course, but by copying down sentences that he wrote - I don’t know, I can’t quite explain it. You just feel what it feels like to write like that, and you feel as though you’re better off as a writer for the effort.
“Always, always, if you were my student, I'd tell you to allow the epiphany to occur in the reader's mind before it's stated on the page."
This was exactly what I expected from the author of Fight Club, which is to say that I knew going into it that I had no idea what to expect.
I will say, though, that if you hated Fight Club (entirely possible) and can’t understand why people connect so powerfully with Chuck Palahniuk, you’ll never guess how good this book is. It’ll take you completely by surprise and make you wonder if you weren’t missing something the whole time (you were.)
Consider This is part memoir, part technical instruction manual, part MFA masterclass, part I-don’t-even-know-what. It’s incredible, though, which I guess is what I’m trying to say.
Palahniuk packs decades of experience into this book to show you - in dangerous, exciting, and illuminating ways - what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing.
The only way you could write a book like this is if you were just watching and observing everything all the time; if you possessed a keen intelligence, pierced through with a horrific, true life story, and an absolute love of taking over the minds of others through storytelling. That’s the only way.
The brilliance all comes in flashes, punctuated with hilarity and horror, until it all comes together in the end, everything makes sense, and you realize that this is the book you needed the whole time.
“A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days.”
You can finish this book in just a few hours (it’s only about 90 pages long) and if you’re a writer, or you think you might want to be one, it will stay with you for a very long time. That was the case for me, as I kept coming back to my notes on this book for weeks after I finished it.
The Writing Life is one of the top “advice for writers” books, right alongside Bird by Bird, On Writing (Stephen King and Charles Bukowski - different books, same title), Draft No 4, and Consider This, among others.
Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for another book of hers, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and she’s been writing up a storm for decades. Novels, narrative nonfiction, essays, etc. In this book, she shares her absolute best tips and tricks.
She’s been described as a “gregarious recluse,” as she’s far more comfortable out in her cabin on the West Coast of the US than in the city, but she welcomes you right in as a fellow writer, artist, and creative, and lets you in on everything she’s been thinking about when it comes to crafting the perfect sentence, connecting to readers, seeing as a writer, dealing with the monotony of the writing life, and everything else that comes with dedicating oneself to words.
I really don’t see how, if you want to be a writer, you can’t just devote, like, a couple of hours to reading one of the best books out there on how to be a better writer.
She’ll explain the real purpose of setting a schedule and sticking to it, the differences between and advantages of several competing writing styles, how to dig deeper in your writing and come up with insights and lessons that are unavailable to those unable to sit still and wait, and how to deal with the vicissitudes of the writing life.
Even if you’re not a writer, you should still read it, if for no other reason than to see how a master craftswoman does it.
"This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be."
This is one of my all-time favorite books about writing, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed out loud more often than I did while reading it, with the possible exception of the work of David Foster Wallace. To answer the most pressing question, “Why is it called Bird by Bird?” here’s the passage where the title comes from:
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day.
We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.
Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
There’s so much incredible stuff in here, it’s just an inexhaustible well of wisdom, creativity, and motivation for making the craft of writing your life’s work. And now, of course, I recommend it all the time.
I have more than eight pages of notes on everything from the advantages and pitfalls of actually getting published, to the more technical considerations of character, plot, and voice, all the way through to what books are actually for, and why any otherwise sane person would want to dedicate their life to writing them.
I honestly can’t say enough wonderful things about this book, and as far as I’m concerned it’s an absolutely essential book “on writing,” right up there with On Writing, by Stephen King, and The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard, among others. Just like a really fantastic novel, I keep coming back to it, again and again, and every time I do, I come back richer and wiser than before, in all sorts of wonderful ways.
"Whenever someone says it's not quite there yet, they're usually right. But when they tell you why it's not quite there yet and what to do to fix it, they're usually wrong."
This one’s for you if you don’t just want to write a book, but instead you want to write someone’s favorite book. You don’t just want to publish something, make a minor splash, and move on, but instead shake up your genre, innovate in your field, and make something that stands the test of time.
The principles discussed in Perennial Seller don’t just apply to authors, of course, but rather to everyone who wants to create and market artistic work that achieves longevity, lasting impact, recurring profits, and perhaps even cult status.
Holiday covers a multitude of important elements behind some of the most lasting creative work, including the critical importance of relentless testing, how to think about your work across longer time horizons, the reasons to tackle timeless themes instead of trending topics, and many others, including things that most people think of as afterthoughts, such as soliciting feedback, careful editing, and igniting word of mouth marketing.
In Ryan Holiday’s approach, and the route taken by many of the Great Masters, the marketing of an artistic work isn’t bolted on as an afterthought, but rather baked into the process from the very beginning, informing the entire creation of the work, and influencing its chances of reaching critical mass.
Only when you understand your audience, strategize for the long term, put your whole soul into your life’s work, and sweat the details that most people just aren’t interested in attending to, can you make something that will eventually develop a life of its own.
“Well, I’m 34 now. If I don’t make it by the time I’m 60, I’m just going to give myself 10 more years.”
I consider Charles Bukowski the patron saint of minimum wage-slaves, and most of his books that I’ve read were consumed during 12-hour stretches at my overnight, hospital security job from which he eventually convinced me it was possible to escape.
This book is a collection of his correspondence - letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers - where he discusses the writing life, artistic creation, the drudgery of blue-collar life, and what kept him going for the decades before he was able to break free as well.
If you know Bukowski, you’ll know that there’s nothing pretentious in here, no artistic affectations, no prissy poet stuff. It’s all real, all genuine, the words not just touching the paper, but ripping it and setting it on fire.
In the end, he and I both made it. We both left our old lives behind, Bukowski in his fifties, me in my thirties, both of us profoundly changed by the books we had read, and also by the opportunities afforded to us by taking our writing seriously and really going for it.
This isn’t your typical “how to tell a story,” “passive versus active voice,” -type writing book. But if you want your writing to leap off the page and into the souls of your readers, if you want your writing to be yours and not the production of some assembly-line, paint-by-numbers writing course, this is your book and Charles Bukowski is your guy.
“A clear sentence is no accident.”
This book reads almost like a warm letter from a really good friend, someone who wanted to encourage you to follow your literary ambitions and believe in your own uniqueness, while “doing what you want to do and doing it well.” That’s what Zinsser believed was important, and that’s what this book will inspire you to do.
William Zinsser was a Yale professor and the author of 18 books, who believed that economy defined great writing, and that the quality of one’s prose improved in proportion to the number of things you left out of it. He was all about brevity, accuracy, and precision - saying what you mean and saying it clearly.
On Writing Well is for everybody who wants to write or who needs to do at least some writing as part of their work; it’s not just for novelists.
And as you can see from my notes below, he didn’t waste a whole lot of words to get to the point, either, the result being a breezy, tactical, easy-to-read guide that I’ve found incredibly helpful to return to again and again.
“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
One of my favorite authors ever, Ray Bradbury, wrote a book…on writing! I’m so there! No one else could have written this book, and every page is stamped with his singular personality and passion for stories and the written word. To put it another way: this book is alive.
Bradbury is the author of one of my favorite books of all time, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian novel about a future in which books are banned and firemen don’t fight fires - they burn books. It’s a damn good book - one of the best, in my opinion - and Bradbury’s created world was, in a very real way, alive too. At least it was alive to me. Part of me still lives there.
So it didn’t take very much convincing at all to get me to read Bradbury’s book on writing, and it definitely didn’t disappoint! It’s all about grabbing hold of inspiration and finding magic on the printed page; it’s about developing and embracing the writer’s passion for creating fictional worlds and getting nonfictional people to live in them; and it’s about mastering something that means more to you than anything else in the entire world.
Part memoir, part writing guide, all Bradbury, all books, all the time! That’s Zen in the Art of Writing. It’s split up into 11 separate essays with one singular theme: the joy of writing about the true, magical nature of the real world we live in.
Forward this to a friend you think would love this book!
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OK, that’s it for now…
More excellent book recommendations coming your way soon!
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With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your week!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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