On Ten Essential Books for Creative Writing Students

If They Don't Know Them Already

Some very interesting reactions to yesterday’s definitely not-Top Ten of writers who are influencing Creative Writing students.

(I realise I managed to do that without calling them influencers.)

I’ll put together a revised list, some time — and perhaps separate out BA and MA/MFA levels, so please do make suggestions.

That’s especially the case if you’re teaching or studying this academic year.

Here are my ten books.

I could have picked at least two dozen more —

1. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

2. Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

3. George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

6. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

7. Václav Havel, Open Letters

8. Marina Tsvetayeva, Earthly Signs: Moscow Diaries, 1917-1922

9. Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

10. Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James

That Flannery O’Connor.

What a thing.

In my final lecture at Birkbeck, I said —

..most of what anyone needs to learn about writing stories is contained between pages 63 and 118 of Mystery and Manners.

Jane Alison’s book is a wonderful counter to the hero’s journey school of thinking. There is another way. (See also Ursula Le Guin’s ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.)

George Saunders has, since it was published, become the main textbook I put on any reading list. It provides a model of close, live, engaged reading.

Scott McCloud’s manual is, quite simply, one of the best books about narrative I’ve ever read. It might take a little mental translation of panels to paragraphs, but all he says about slicing up time applies to prose fiction just as much as to sequential art. (See also Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative and Comics and Sequential Art.)

Playing the the Dark by Toni Morrison puts many obvious things into question, not just whiteness. It’s one of the critical books I find myself thinking about most often whilst writing, rather than whilst teaching or writing about writing.

Italo Calvino’s six chosen values are still looking good, a quarter of the way through this century. They are lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and (though we have to imagine what he would have said) consistency.

Václav Havel and Marina Tsvetayeva are here to give some sense of what writing can mean when it’s not simply, or can no longer be, entertainment. When it is a matter of political or poetic life or death. Everyone should read Havel’s essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’.

What do you think? Might Virginia Woolf’s Diaries be too much? Along with Keats’ letters, they give the clearest picture of the day-to-dayness of being an original writer. A struggling writer.

Both Woolf and the Henry James Notebooks are for reading in, rather than reading cover-to-cover. They are a glimpse into the troubled studies of two extraordinary writers. The James allows us to trace his stories and novels from the smallest hint, through the working out — sometimes shockingly calculated — to the drafting and then the retrospective judgement.

Some of those other books —

• bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

• R.F. Langley, Journals

• Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

• Osip Mandelstam, The Noise of Time

• The Paris Review Interviews