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.

• Carmel Bird, Dear Writer, McPhee Gribble, 1988
• 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
  
• 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, NY, 2003

 

MEMOIR

• 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

 

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

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