Some things just clarify for a writer, "This is how to write..."
We ask our teachers...Name a book or piece of writing worth reading that would help someone with their writing. Not a How To but a book that gets at the heart of what it is to write:
Bill Donahue
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," an essay by T.S. Eliot
Shanna Germain
Can I do poems instead? Clive James' "Windows Is Shutting Down," Billy Collins' "Workshop," & Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B."
Ariel Gore
The Year of Magical Thinking or The Things They Carried. That old book by Annie Dillard is great, too. It's not how-to, but it's called The Writing Life.
Marc Acito
Never in a million years would I imagine I had anything in common with the likes of Haruki Murakami, but his essay on running and writing in the June 9th New Yorker made me underline passage after passage.
Kathleen Halme
The tool I use every time I write is Random House Word Menu. Two pounds of word bliss for any writer of prose or poetry, 801 pages of sumptuous language and detail. The menu is grouped into seven general categories of knowledge such as Nature or Arts and Leisure, and these big sections are broken down into 800 subcategories. Here’s a simple example: I want my character to wear an unusual kind of hat. I look under "Domestic Life" which leads me to clothing and to hats--a page and a half of names and descriptions of hats! Will my character wear a sundown, cloche, or mobcap? Will he wear a snapbrim, taboosh or sugar loaf? This is the pleasure of the word menu; it's a repository of fresh language, a way to make words come alive.
Liz Prato
Go back and re-read what you loved when you were young. I just re-read “Ramona the Brave” and “Are You There God It’s Me, Margaret” and it helped me get in touch with what I loved about fiction to begin with. Re-read any required text from high school that you actually liked. There’s a reason that it spoke to you. Re-connect with it.
More to come.
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