Recommended books on writing and editing

FICTION AND NARRATIVE NON-FICTION

Please note that many of the principles that apply to fiction are equally relevant to narrative non-fiction.

Susan Bell, The Artful Edit: On the practice of editing yourself, Norton, 2007
Carmel Bird, Dear Writer, McPhee Gribble, 1988
Helen Corner-Bryant and Kathryn Price, On Editing: How to edit your novel the professional way, John Murray Learning, 2018
Gary Disher, Writing Fiction: an introduction to the craft, Allen & Unwin, 2001
Louise Doughty, A Novel in a Year, Simon & Schuster, 2007
Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe, Making Stories: How Ten Australian Novels were Written, Allen & Unwin, 1993
David Jauss, On Writing Fiction: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft, Writer’s Digest Books, 2011
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Hodder & Stoughton, 2000
Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, Riverhead Books, 2000
Priscilla Long, The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life, Wallingford Press, 2010
Robert McKee, Story: Style, Structure, Substance and the Principles of Screenwriting, HarperCollins, 1997
John Mullan, How Novels Work, Oxford University Press, 2006
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer, HarperCollins, 2006
Alexander Steele (ed), Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction: A practical guide from New York's acclaimed creative writing school, Bloomsbury, 2003
Viginia Tufte, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Graphics Press, 2017
John Yorke, Into the Woods: How stories work and why we tell them, Penguin, 2013

Judith Barrington, Writing the memoir, Allen & Unwin, 1997
Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story, Farrar Straus and Giroux, NY, 2001
Drusilla Modjeska, Timepieces, Picador, 2002
William Zinsser, On Writing Well – Memoir, Collins, 2001

Ann Whitford Paul, Writing Picture Books – A Hands-On Guide from Story Creation to Publication, Writer's Digest Books, 2009