New Books for Authors

 

September marks the beginning of the fall book season, a good time to identify new resources that can give us a fresh perspective on writing. (Besides, with Christmas just around the corner, it’s not too early to drop gift hints to family and friends!)

How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling, by Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness, and Kate Tellers (New York: Crown, 2022).

You may already be a fan of “The Moth,” NPR’s weekly program of true stories now in its twenty-sixth year. How to Tell a Story explains how their staff coach people to find memorable stories in their own life experience, then relate them in ways that make the deepest impression on the rest of us. Few of these storytellers are writers, but they harbor stories that give us life-changing Aha! moments. How to Tell a Story reminds us that if we identify our most significant stories and tell them in significant ways, we will earn the gratitude of people who live and work beside us.

The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write: A Handbook for Fiction Writers, by Sarah Burton and Jem Poster (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

Burton and Poster co-founded Cambridge University’s creative writing program, yet this book is not a desiccated text for college students to memorize for final exams. It’s a liberating journey of self-discovery. The authors say, “We don’t have a formula (because there isn’t one), and although we’ll be offering plenty of advice, we won’t be giving you rules, because unless we want all writers to be writing in the same way, rules are not going to be helpful. And although this book is written by writers, we don’t aim to make you write the way we write. We want to help you write the way you write, to develop your own unique voice.” The Book You Need to Read… is both inspirational and iconoclastic, likely to open the floodgates of your own creativity.

Writing Unforgettable Characters: How to Create Story People Who Jump Off the Page, by James Scott Bell (Woodland Hills, CA: Compendium Press, 2020).

James Scott Bell was a frustrated writer. Creative writing professors panned his first attempts, saying they were dull and lifeless. So he tried to get a law degree. He tried acting. Still no spark. Then he and his wife went to see the movie Moonstruck, starring Cher Bono. The movie bowled him over. On their way out of the theater, he told his wife, “I have to try writing again. I want to be able to make people feel the way I’m feeling now.” So he focused on creating one-of-a-kind characters like Cher, and his writing career took off.  Writing Unforgettable Characters explains why memorable characters are critical to memorable fiction, and teaches us how to create them. Another indispensable tool from James Scott Bell.

On Revision: The Only Writing That Counts, by William Germano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

“Good writing has a convincing shape. But it doesn’t just look good on the page. It sounds good…,” William Germano writes. “So the best rule for revising your writing is the simplest: listen to it…Read it out loud.” Unlike the stiff, formal guide we might expect from a university press, On Revision is an intuitive book that encourages us to follow our hunches and keep revising a manuscript until its true vision emerges. Germano has written several books on scholarly publishing. He is dean of humanities at the Cooper Union in New York.

Write Your First Novel, by Gilbert Morris and Steve Laube (Phoenix, AZ: Christian Writers Institute, 2023).

To be released next March, this book caught my eye because of its authors. The late Gilbert Morris published more than 230 Christian novels with total sales of more than seven million copies, making him the undisputed pioneer in this field. Agent Steve Laube represents some of the leading Christian authors of both fiction and nonfiction, and now edits the annual Christian Writer’s Market Guide. With these reputations, Morris and Laube are sure to produce a book that aspiring authors will want, sight unseen.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. His most recent book is Hard Times (Warner Press: 2019). He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.