Welcome to Gaia! ::

I was just wondering if anyone has any writing reference books and suchlike that they would recommend? I found the Nanowrimo guide (No Plot, No Problem) pretty helpful throughout the month -- it's also quite funny. I've also got a book about writing fantasy and sci-fi and creating fantasy worlds, but I didn't get a chance to delve into that during November at all because I was too busy just plain writing. xd (It's called The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction by Philip Athans, if you are interested.)

So! Anyone else have any recommendations?

I have that book, binary. It's a great text. I have others on writing as well, but they're too far away and I'm too comfortable to go look at their titles right now.

- fails -

However, I used to go and read a lot of writing articles online when I was younger. They can be found anywhere and everywhere, and the majority of them are very helpful -- as helpful as books, in fact!

That's a good idea, cage -- the peer editing forum, I mean. But that's good that you're trying to utilize the advice I gave you! I hope it works out well! 8DD

Two of the best books on writing I've ever read:

Stein on Writing

How to Grow a Novel

Both by the same author, and there's some overlap between then, but these really helped me bring my writing to the next level. I read these in between a couple of creative writing courses I took at community college, and went from having pretty good writing in the first course to winning an award for a short story I wrote in the second. So, yeah. Got to recommend them. They're supremely readable and have a nice conversational tone.

If you write genre fiction you might also be interested in LeGuin's Language of the Night, which is a collection of essays on spec fic stuff. I enjoyed it, but it's LeGuin so it's a little fighty in places. She's a fiesty and intelligent woman and if I'm remembering right there are some lovely ice burns in here directed at other (unnamed) SF authors. I'm one of her fanpoodles though so YMMV.

I also had a subscription to Writer's Digest for many years, and while there's a lot of crap in there, I have a whole stack of clippings of the really good articles that were worth saving. I'll go back through those and find the names of some of the authors of the better ones if anyone's interested.