Writing about Writing
Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode
Steve Almond, Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow
Margaret Atwood, On Writers and Writing
Paul Auster, A Life in Words: Conversations with I.B. Siegumfeldt
Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger
Paul Auster, Collected Prose
Paul Auster, The Red Notebook
Andrea Barrett and Peter Turchi (eds), A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on their Craft
Charles Baxter, The Art of Subtext
Charles Baxter, Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature
The Letters of Rosemary and Bernadette Mayer 1976-1980
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear
Elizabeth Benedict, The Joy of Writing Sex
Tegan Bennett Daylight, The Details
Between the Covers podcast transcripts from Tin House (https://tinhouse.com/transcripts)
Adam Biles (ed), The Shakespeare and Company Book of Interviews
Carmel Bird, Not Now Jack - I’m Writing a Novel
Christopher Bisby, Writers in Conversation volumes
BOMB Magazine, The Author Interviews
Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World
Jenny Boully, Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (https://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/fall-2006/classics/notes-writing-novel-elizabeth-bowen)
Kate Briggs, This Little Art
Janet Burroway (ed), A Story Larger Than My Own: Women Writers Look Back on their Lives and Careers
BWB texts, Writers’ Lives
Amina Cain, A Horse at Night: On Writing
Hortense Calisher, Herself
Italo Calvino, The Written World and the Unwritten World
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Julia Cameron, The Vein of Gold
Julia Cameron, The Right to Write
John Casey, Beyond The First Draft
Christopher Castellani, The Art of Perspective
Catapult ‘Don’t Write Alone’ series (https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone)
Adriana Cavarero, Narration
Nick Cave, Faith, Hope, and Carnage
Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill and Jill Richards, The Ferrante Letters
Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972-2009
Hélène Cixous, The Writing Notebooks Interview
Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text, and Politics
Pat Conroy, My Reading Life
Conversations with Anne Rice (Michael Riley ed)
The Creative Independent website [https://thecreativeindependent.com]
Moyra Davey, Index Cards
Peter Ho Davies, The Art of Revision
Lydia Davis, Essays
Michelle de Kretser, On Shirley Hazzard
Stacey D’Erasmo, The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between
Tiziana de Rogatis, Elena Ferrante’s Key Words
Louise DeSalvo, The Art of Slow Writing
Annie Dillard, The Writing Book
Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence
Mark Doty, The Art of Description
Aidan Doyle, The Writer’s Book of Doubt
Marguerite Duras, Writing
Marguerite Duras, Practicalities
Rachel Eisendrath, Gallery of Clouds
Lucie Elven, Notes on Craft, https://granta.com/notes-on-craft-elven/
Jenny Erpenbeck, Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces
Beverley Farmer, A Body of Water
Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia
Elena Ferrante, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
Mary Gaitskill, The Devil’s Treasure
Eduardo Galeano, Hunter of Stories
Greg Gerke, See What I See
Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
Gail Godwin, The Making of a Writer
Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Natalie Goldberg, Wild Mind
Natalie Goldberg, Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft
Natalie Goldberg, The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and this Zigzag Life
Kate Grenville, The Writing Book
Susan Griffin, Out of Silence, Sound. Out of Nothing, Something.
Kristjana Gunnars, Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing
Sarah Hall and Tessa Hadley in Conversation, Granta [https://granta.com/sarah-hall-tessa-hadley-conversation/]
Melinda Harvey on Rachel Cusk, ‘Verisimilitude’, The Sydney Review of Books [https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/cusk-outline-trilogy-coventry/]
Shirley Hazzard, We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays
Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Wonder Paradox
Steven Heighton, Workbook: Memos and Dispatches On Writing
Sheila Heti, Interview with Mary Gaitskill [https://culture.org/an-interview-with-mary-gaitskill/]
Kazuo Ishiguro, My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs
Shirley Jackson, Let Me Tell You
Shirley Jackson, The Letters of Shirley Jackson
Fenton Johnson, At the Centre of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life
Antigone Kefala, Late Journals
Antigone Kefala, Sydney Journals
Ralph Keyes, The Courage to Write
Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences about writing
Stephen Koch, Modern Library Writer’s Workshop
Lee Kofman, The Writer Laid Bare: Mastering Emotional Honesty in a Writer’s Art, Craft and Life
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel
The ‘Show Your Working’ series on Kill Your Darlings [https://www.killyourdarlings.com.au]
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World
Ursula K. Le Guin, Dreams Must Explain Themselves
Ursula K. Le Guin, Conversations on Writing with David Naimon
Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone
Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
Ursula K. Le Guin, Words Are My Matter
Deborah Levy, Things I Don’t Want to Know
Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living
Literary Hub Craft of Writing Series (https://lithub.com/story-type/the-craft-of-writing/)
Margot Livesey, The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing
Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of Reading and Fiction
Calum McCann, Letters to a Young Writer
Alice McDermott, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
Fiona McGregor, A Novel Idea
Donald Maass, The Emotional Craft of Fiction
Sara Maitland, The Writer’s Way
Meredith Maran (ed), Why We Write
Javier Marías, Written Lives
Alice Mattison, The Kite and the String
Craft essays on Meanjin [https://meanjin.com.au]
Catriona Menzies-Pike (ed), Open Secrets: Essays on the Writing Life
Catriona Menzies-Pike (ed), Critic Swallows Book: Ten Years of the Sydney Review of Books
Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing
Murakami, Novelist as Vocation
Anaïs Nin, D H Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
Anaïs Nin, A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin
Anaïs Nin, Diaries
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer
Mary Oliver, Upstream
Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor
Chuck Palahniuk, Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different
Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and Sentimental Novelist
The Paris Review Interviews
Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats
Adam Phillips, In Writing
Carl Phillips, My Trade is Mystery
DBC Pierre, Release the Bats
Questlove, Creative Quest
Anna Quindlen, Write for Your Life
Diana M Raab (ed), Writers and Their Notebooks
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Josephine Rowe, On Beverley Farmer
Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Dani Shapiro, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
Matthew Salesses, Craft in the Real World
James Salter, The Art of Fiction
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
May Sarton, The House By The Sea
May Sarton, Writing on Writing
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders substack: Story Club
Joan Silber, The Art of Time in Fiction
Leïla Slimani (transl. Sam Taylor), The Scent of Flowers at Night
Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel
Kim Stafford, The Muses Among Us
Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction
John Steinbeck (ed Robert DeMott), Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
Janet Sternburg, The Writer on Her Work, volumes 1 and 2
Kae Tempest, On Connection
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters
Zadie Smith, ‘Dance Lessons for Writers’
Maria Tatar, The Heroine with 1001 Faces
Scarlett Thomas, Monkeys with Typewriters
Colm Tóibín, A Guest At the Feast
Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist
Anne Truitt, Yield: The Journal of an Artist
Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Jane Vandenburgh, Architecture of the Novel: A Writer’s Handbook
Kurt Vonnegut, Pity the Reader
Betsy Warland, Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letters
Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects
Charlotte Wood, The Writer’s Room
Charlotte Wood, The Luminous Solution: Creativity, Resilience and the Inner Life
James Wood, How Fiction Works
James Wood, The Broken Estate
Virginia Woolf’s Journals
Virginia Woolf’s Letters
Virginia Woolf , A Writer’s Diary
The Writer Magazine
The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House
The Writer’s Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House