Creativity Archives - Michelle Richmond

7 Inspiring Books for Writers in Any Genre

Every writer must be a reader first, and the best education you can get is by reading. The most inspiring books for writers aren’t necessarily books about writing. Remember the first novel you wanted to tell others about? The first story that stuck in your mind? The first character you wished you could know in real life?

Reading widely across genres is essential. If you want to write literary fiction, reading crime novels can give you a stronger grasp on plot. If you want to write thrillers, reading literary novels can help you better understand the nuances of character development. Immerse yourself in novels, story collections, essays, poetry. Read for pleasure, and read with analytical eye. See what makes the writing tick. Those books will the foundation of your education in writing.

But when the well is dry, when you go to your computer or your notebook and feel adrift, books about writing can get you into the writing mood again. Here are seven books for writers that I recommend to students in my novel writing class, ranging from the practical to the inspiring.

First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Write, and Life, by Joe Moran

This isn’t just a book about what makes a wonderful sentence (although it is that). It’s also a book about how sentences lead us into our writing, how sentences guide us to discovery and help an idea become a story. This book is an inspiration for those of us who geek out on language and a primer for anyone who wants to know how a great sentence is made, and why it matters. Get it on Amazon.

Novel Starter: 50 Days of Exercises and Advice to Help You Start Your Novel, from the Fiction Attic Press Master Class Series

Designed to help writers kickstart their novels, Novel Starter features 50 days of assignments, prompts, and inspiration, arranged in a progression to help you get the most out of your writing practice. Ten-minute prompts help you break through writers’s block, generative exercises help you write scenes and chapters, and craft keys demystify the fundamentals of narrative craft. If you want a 50-day boot camp to get your novel off the ground, this is the book for you. Get Novel Starter on Amazon.

Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in The Writer’s Life, by Bonnie Friedman

According to Friedman, “Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences, they are the ones who keep writing.” While the other books on this list focus on narrative craft, Writing Past Dark is the book you’ll turn to when you feel gobsmacked by your novel, and you’re not sure how (or why) to continue. Get it on Amazon.

Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction, by Patricia Highsmith

You don’t have to be a writer of crime fiction or thrillers to learn a great deal from this slim, to-the-point guide on creating suspense in fiction. Highsmith’s advice on everything from plotting to getting past “snags” is invaluable to novelists in any genre. As a writer of literary fiction, I found that it provided me with a much-needed kick in the pants. Get it on Amazonor Bookshop.org.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert

Listen to this audiobook whenever you think, “Why am I doing this? Can I really do this?” Gilbert is like a cheerleader standing on the sidelines of your writing life. Get it at Bookshop.org or Audible.

The Apprentice Writer: Essays, by Julian Green

A refreshing, wide-ranging collection of essays by a French-American writer. While the essays cover various subjects such as translation and Paris neighborhoods, the book is worth reading for the essays “How a Novelist Begins,” “Where do Novels Come From?”, and “Lectures on Writing.” This one isn’t that easy to find, but if you do stumble across it, be sure to buy it!

On Writing:A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King

By the time I got around to reading this modern classic by one of the most prolific writers of our time, I’d already published three novels. I wish I’d found it sooner! While King’s smart, down-to-earth memoir/writing lesson is a must-read for beginning novelists, fiction writers at any stage of their careers will find much to admire and be inspired by. Consider it a crash course in how to write fiction that people want to read. Get it at Bookshop.org or Audible.

Letters to a Young Writer, by Colum McCann

This wide-ranging book by Pulitzer Prize winning author and long-time teacher McCann is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read on writing. McCann talks about how to focus on the work instead of the ego, how to get past envy, how to work with an agent, and why exhaustion is an essential part of the writing process. If you’re in a slump, this brilliant little book will pull you out of it. Get it on Amazon or Bookshop.org.

Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of THE WONDER TEST, THE MARRIAGE PACT, and six other novels and story collections. She mentors writers through Fiction Master Class.

How to End a Story

Stories are like relationships: the beginning is always so much fun, and the ending is fraught with turmoil.

When I sit down to start a story, the first sentence just sort of comes to me. The second sentence too. If I’m lucky, the third swiftly follows. The inimitable short story writer Kate Braverman once told a group of enraptured graduate students (they happened to be my students, and she was wowing them with her general exuberance and wonderful strangeness) that she channels her characters. A bit like spirits, some linguistically gifted version of the returning dead. They speak throughher and onto the page, as if she isn’t even there.

I, unfortunately, channel nothing. It is all rough work after sentence three. By the time I’m in the middle of the story, I’m feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Where am I going? Where have I been? Have I gotten lost in the labyrinth? Probably, yes.

Somehow, I find my way through. The characters do things. They meet with hardship and grief, or maybe they just meet some swanky fellow in a bar or a Laundromat. They get into trouble, maybe out of it. Probably not. I find myself feeling that they have done all they can do. Not much more can be said. The action has fallen. We have all had our dénouement (which, by the way, is a French term meaning untying, from Middle French desnouement, from desnouer – to untie – from Old French desnoer, from des- de- + noer meaning to tie, from Latin nodare, from nodus knot.) And here we are in the labyrinth again, attempting to untie the knot, unwind the rope, escape the not-so-fun funhouse.

It’s time to write our way out.

One wants to resolve things, after all.One feels a deeply human need toconclude. After the falling action, there is often something more. Something unexpected. And here we come to what I have been meaning to say all along: a good ending is layered. The reader thinks she has discovered everything she can possibly discover about a story, but then: another image appears, another paragraph hums along, another question begs to be answered. One is left with the feeling of having walked out of the dark theatre into the light, only to realize there was something else playing after the credits, some secret part of the film, some final moment. You can hear it through the door, vaguely, but you can’t get back in. You’re not sure what you’ve missed, but you’re certain that you’ve missed something, that the reel kept on playing, the story kept on going, after your departure. You were only an observer, a brief malingerer, there but not there. The lives within the story carry on.

Michelle Richmond is the author of four books of fiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Year of Fog. She is the creator of the Guided Workbooks for Writers series.

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I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature

Despite her knowledge of Greek and her voracious reading of the classics, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. As a woman, she had been denied the illustrious Oxford education that the men in her family enjoyed. As it turns out, her lack of affectation, her insistence on taking pleasure in reading, is what makes her essays on literature so lucid, smart, and delicious to read.

Reviewing The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz notes that, despite Woolf’s place in “the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy,” her essays were written not for the academic but for the common reader, the category in which she rather modestly placed herself. The common reader, she posited, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”

Here, Schwarz excerpts Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library”:

A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill…the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom eating is more the nature of brisk exercise in the open wire than of a sheltered study.

For all of her wealth and status–the very condition that allowed her the coveted room of one’s own–Woolf also believed passionatelym Schwarz notes, in the democracy of reading, as evidenced in her essay “The Leaning Tower.”

Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.

Woolf’s prescription for the survival of literature, which might have ruffled feathers in her time, is no less meaningful today. Literature will survive, she wrote,

if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country…teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create. …
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Creative Fidgeting

An article by Roland Rotz, Ph.D., in ADDitude Magazine this month claims you shouldn’t fight the fidget, especially when it comes to children with ADHD:

Doing two things at once, it turns out, can actually help focus the ADHD brain on a primary task.
Experts believe that engaging in an activity that uses a sense other than what’s required for your primary task — listening to music while reading a social studies textbook, for example — can enhance focus and improve performance in children with attention deficit disorder. These secondary tasks are called fidgets — mindless activities you can do while working on a primary task.

Rotz recommends walking, moving around, doodling, using multicolored pens and pencils, keeping your hands busy, listening to music, and chewing gum.

I think anyone–with or without ADHD–can benefit from a bit of creative fidgeting. When I’m stuck in a novel I’m writing, it always helps to get up and move around. When we lived in the Outer Richmond in San Francisco, I used to take long walks on Ocean Beach (well, yes, that does sound like a personal ad, but I did!), and I never came home from one of those walks without a few paragraphs in my head. Something about the zen aspect of moving with no invited noise–I never wear headphones when I walk, so the noise was that of the waves and water, and the hum of traffic on the Great Highway–intensified my focus, such that I would write in my mind as I walked, repeating the sentences in order to memorize them.

I say “invited noise” because, while noise is inescapable, we don’t have to invite it in. Turning off the headphones when you’re running or walking, or turning off the TV when you’re on the treadmill, or turning off the radio in the car, is a way of keeping the endless, not-so-ambiant noise at bay. Of course, one of the fidgeting activities recommended in the ATTitude article is listening to music–so it really depends on the person. My husband always listens to music when he’s writing or reading, and it works for him, but anything with words completely stumps me, because the words crowd out the ones I’m trying to write down. That’s why I can’t write in cafes, which is a method some of my writer friends swear by.

Think about your own creative process. Are there any kinds of fidgeting you do that bring you focus?