Happy new year, fellow writers!
May 2023 be a year in which we all grow better and more confident in our craft.
To that end, I thought I’d suggest some great books on writing to accompany the tips I recommended in my last post.
As an academic and nonfiction editor, I love helping writers feel more empowered by their abilities. As a writer, I’ve recently met new challenges while pivoting away from writing only for academic audiences.
So, I’ve sought out lots of advice as I continue along these two intertwined paths.
Here, I’ll draw your attention to three of the best books on writing I’ve read this past year. None of them are recent releases, but they were new to me.
Though two of these books are aimed specifically at academic writers, they all contain helpful information for any writer looking to polish up their skills and better enjoy their process.
Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics by Joli Jensen
Recently, an academic writer confided to me that she struggles to find time to write with so many competing demands for her attention.
I remember that predicament well!
Fortunately, I discovered Jensen’s advice via her articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education when I was in the midst of that juggling act, but I wish I had thought to check out her book when it was published in 2017.
Jensen’s foundational idea is that, to become the productive writers they’re often pressured to be, academics need regular, low-stress encounters with projects they enjoy.
This is deceptively simple advice.
But, Jensen has strategies for all three pieces of the puzzle, including how to find the time, space, and energy to write, counteract the negative thoughts that obstruct many writers, and implement tips for tricky situations, from letting go of “toxic projects” to navigating semester breaks, when time disappears too quickly.
With an impressive track record of academic publishing, Jensen speaks not only from personal experience, but also from professional experience as the co-founder and director of a faculty writing program.
No wonder this book is replete with so much excellent advice. Check it out!
Stylish Academic Writing by Helen Sword
Despite the (pleasantly succinct) title of this book, I found it helpful as I was looking to streamline my prose when writing for non-academic audiences.
Nonfiction writers could easily skip the first part of this book, though it’s eye opening for academics.
Sword begins by investigating scholarly writing, looking for evidence that academics actually adhere to pervasive and sometimes conflicting beliefs about what makes academic writing fit to publish.
Examining scholarly writing across disciplines, she discovers shifting norms underlying trends in academic writing, including some practices that are abjured in certain academic style manuals.
She concludes that academic writers often have more freedom to write engagingly than they believe.
In the second part of the book, Sword turns to dispensing concrete writing tips.
She indicates various tics that can bedevil academic writers, from a tendency to distance the subjects and verbs of sentences to a neglect of large-scale structural devices that can help readers better apprehend writers’ arguments.
Along the way, she provides examples of compelling academic writing from authors who are respected in their fields, and sometimes, by general readers as well.
This is a great read for anyone who’d like to refresh their writing style and a validation for academic writers who could use a bit more convincing that it’s OK to do so.
The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity by Louise DeSalvo
DeSalvo was a genre-crossing writer who published scholarly work, award-winning memoirs, and books on creative writing.
In this offering, she mines the archives of literary luminaries, including historical figures like D.H. Lawrence and more contemporary writers like Junot Diaz, to discover how they talk about the writing process in diaries, letters, and interviews.
As her title indicates, DeSalvo found a great deal of evidence to suggest that good, mature writing emerges slowly, from a complex process that writers would do well to embrace despite pressures to produce and develop quickly.
In five main sections, she outlines elements of the book-writing process—from preparing to write through completing extended works—and incorporates a section dedicated to the importance of rest.
She also emphasizes that her book is not a how-to writing manual.
Instead, she encourages writers to slow down and reflect on how to shape their own practices and achieve their best work over the course of a project and a career.
Between DeSalvo’s appealing voice and the treasure trove of great writers’ reflections she’s compiled, the book is as pleasurable as it is thought provoking.
It’s a great read if you’re looking for inspiration to begin a new year of writing.
Best of luck!
More reading! From time to time, I update an annotated bibliography of books on writing on my website. See here if you’re interested. It’s due for a redraft soon.