There are many good books on writing fiction that can help you hone your craft. These are the writing resources I’ve read (or listened to) and found most helpful.
Crafting Your Story
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How To Edit Yourself into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King
Hands down, this is the one I recommend most often. It uses easy-to-understand examples and covers so many fiction-writing fundamentals: point of view, characterization, dialogue, and showing versus telling, as well as sentence-level revisions such as limiting phrases that begin with “as” or “-ing” constructions.
The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction: The Complete Guide to Finding Your Story, Honing Your Skills, and Glorifying God in Your Novel by Jeff Gerke
A comprehensive guide for every step of crafting a novel.
How To Edit Your Novel: Practical Tips for Strengthening Your Story by Karin Beery
Learn what developmental editors and line editors look for in the manuscripts they edit and how to address weaknesses.
Writing Excuses podcast https://writingexcuses.com/
A “fast-paced, educational podcast for writers, by writers” that provides craft advice, a book of the week, and practice exercises in fifteen to twenty minutes a week.
Fiction-Writing Techniques
The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile by Noah Lukeman
Written by a literary agent, this book details the mistakes agents and editors look for when deciding whether to dismiss a manuscript or keep reading.
5 Editors Tackle the 12 Fatal Flaws of Fiction by C. S. Lakin, Linda S. Clare, Christy Distler, Robin Patchen, and Rachel Starr Thomson
These five editors offer detailed instruction on how to identify and fix a dozen common flaws.
The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Becca Puglisi and Angela Ackerman
A helpful reference for showing emotions, especially with body language.
Editing Fiction at Sentence Level by Louise Harnby
Editor Louise Harnby details the issues to look for during the line editing stage, after story-level editing and before proofreading, from tense problems to filter words.
The Author’s Checklist: An Agent’s Guide to Developing and Editing Your Manuscript by Elizabeth K. Kracht
Advice from a literary agent on a variety of topics, from acknowledgments to world building.
Show, Don’t Tell: How To Write Vivid Descriptions, Handle Backstory, and Describe Your Characters’ Emotions by Sandra Gerth
A detailed look at this crucial issue that can make or break a book.
PUGS: Punctuation, Usage, Grammar, and Spelling
The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know by June Casagrande
Written by a copy editor, this guide provides “everything you need to approach grammar with confidence.”
It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences by June Casagrande
This book, by the same author, is focused on using grammar to craft well-written sentences and avoid clarity issues. And it made me laugh. Win-win.
Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style by Benjamin Dreyer
Another copy editor with a healthy sense of humor, Dreyer goes into rules and nonrules, commonly misused words, and punctuation, all while reminding us that the goal is clarity for the reader.
Proofreading Secrets of Best-Selling Authors by Kathy Ide
A succint and straightforward guide to presenting a polished, professional manuscript. While it can’t take the place of a professional proofreader (after multiple revisions, writers’ brains tend to see what should be there on the page instead of what is there), following the guidelines in this book can reduce proofreading costs.
Reference Guides
The Chicago Manual of Style
The Christian Writer’s Manual of Style
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary
Garner’s Modern English Usage
These reference books are standard in the book publishing industry. If you need to know whether a word should be hyphenated, if a military title should be capitalized, or whether it’s “Ziploc” or “ziplock,” among many other minutiae, these are the books used to look it up.
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