Essential Essays for Writers

Outstanding essays on the craft of writing by some of the world's best authors

On Keeping a Notebook by Joan Didion - The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it

Why I Write by Joan Didion - All I knew then was what I wasn’t, and it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer.

Autobiographical Notes by James Baldwin - I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read

The Creative Process by James Baldwin - Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men avoid; the state of being alone

The Art of the Impersonal Essay by Zadie Smith - In my experience, every kind of writing requires some kind of self-soothing Jedi mind trick

That Crafty Feeling by Zadie Smith - “What I have to say about craft extends no further than my own experience, which is what it is - 12 years and three novels.”

Fail Better by Zadie Smith - Literature’s legacy of honourable failure

How To Write With Style by Kurt Vonnegut - Why should you examine your writing style with the idea of improving it?

Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Real Novelists by Kurt Vonnegut - Can you really teach anyone how to write?

Write Till You Drop by Annie Dillard - “Do you think I could be a writer?” “I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace - “A book-in-progress is a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”

Why I Write by George Orwell - From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer

Everything you Need to Know About Writing Successfully - in Ten Minutes by Stephen King - I know it sounds like an ad for some sleazy writers’ school, but I really am going to tell you everything you need to pursue a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction, and I really am going to do it in ten minutes

A Place You All Know Well by Michael Chabon - I’ve always felt that there’s a kinship between writers and explorers

Write Like a Motherfucker by Cheryl Strayed - Nobody is going to give you a thing. You have to give it yourself. You have to tell us what you have to say.

Why They Aren’t Writing the Great American Novel Anymore by Tom Wolfe - A treatise on the Varieties of Realistic Experience

The Secrets of Suspense by Kathryn Schulz - We love churning apprehension in fiction; we hate it in life. But understanding the most fundamental technique of storytelling can teach us something about being alive.

How Long Does it Take to Write a Book by Chuck Klostermann? - Does staring at a blank computer screen for two hours count as creativity?

The Ill-Defined Plot by John Jeremiah Sullivant - On the orgins of the essay

Mister Lytle by John Jeremiah Sullivan - When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle

Unspoken Truths by Christopher Hitchens - Until cancer attacked his vocal cords, the author didn’t fully appreciate what was meant by “a writer’s voice”

On Being a Woman Writer by Lidia Yuknavitch - A very smart man tells me the thing I have written is too much about my self. Too much “I.” Could I please write something else? Differently?

Annie Dillard and the Writing Life by Alexander Chee - Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.

Thoughts on Writing by Elizabeth Gilbert - On disicpline, hard work, rejection and why it’s never too late to start

Uncanny the Singing That Comes from Certain Husks by Joy Williams - “Who cares if the writer is not whole? Of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well...”

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination by J.K. Rowling - A commencement address

How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature by Jim Behrle - So you didn’t win a Nobel Prize in Literature. I know, it’s total bullshit. You totally deserved it.

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