Episode 79: Let's talk about craft books

Today, Fable and The Verbivore discuss a variety of books that we’ve read on the writing craft.

In this episode, Fable notes that many craft books tend to cover either the author’s personal writing experience or lay out a method for how best (at least in the mind of the author) to approach the act of writing – and some books that we discuss are a little bit of both. Both these types have something to teach, but we feel it’s also important to remember there is not one right way of approaching the writing craft and not everything will be for you and fit with your personal writing process.

We also unpack how reading broadly and widely on this topic has been helpful to us in our own writing journeys, as well as how being open to trying new things can help in finding useful tools and methods that may surprise you.

The list of craft book titles that we share is long, some of them were helpful at different stages in our writing or helped us focus on learning specific things, some we connected with closely and others we didn’t. We also allow ourselves the freedom to put down a book that we’re not ready for or that we’re not connecting with. But for the most part, each book we’ve read has taught us something we needed to hear about this thing called writing.   

We hope you enjoy listening this episode and that you find it encouraging wherever you are at on your writing journey!

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

The Verbivore references author Mur Lafferty’s podcast I Should Be Writing. That podcast is hosted at https://murverse.com/subscribe-to-podcasts/isbw/.

Fable questions how Le Guin is pronounced. Here is a link to the correct pronunciation: https://forvo.com/word/ursula_k._le_guin/

Books Mentioned:

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
’Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Bethany Stedman