Top Writing books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Writing books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Writing

Understanding the concepts of Writing starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience

The journey to become a successful writer is long, fraught with peril, and filled with difficult questions: How do I write dialogue? How do I build suspense? What should I know about query letters? How do I start? The best way to answer these questions is to ditch your uncertainty and transform yourself into a KICK-ASS writer. This new book from award-winning author Chuck Wendig combines the b…

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On Moral Fiction

He says that moral fiction "attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment."

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Getting Into Character: Seven Secrets a Novelist Can Learn from Actors

Want to bring characters to life on the page as vividly as fine actors do on the stage or screen? Getting into Character will give you a whole new way of thinking about your writing. Drawing on the Method acting theory that theater professionals have used for decades, this in-depth guide explains seven characterization techniques and adapts them for the novelist's use.

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Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence

Imagine knowing what the brain craves from every tale it encounters, what fuels the success of any great story, and what keeps readers transfixed. Wired for Story reveals these cognitive secrets—and it’s a game-changer for anyone who has ever set pen to paper. The vast majority of writing advice focuses on “writing well” as if it were the same as telling a great story. This is exactly where ma…

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Self-editing for Fiction Writers

In this completely revised and updated second edition, Renni Browne and Dave King teach you, the writer, how to apply the editing techniques they have developed to your own work. Chapters on dialogue, exposition, point of view, interior monologue, and other techniques take you through the same processes an expert editor would go through to perfect your manuscript. Each point is illustrated wit…

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You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One)

Becoming a writer begins with a simple but important belief: You are a writer; you just need to write. In You Are a Writer, Jeff Goins shares his own story of self-doubt and what it took for him to become a professional writer and best-selling author—and the principles he’s learned from seeing many others do the same. He gives you practical steps to improve your writing, get published, and bui…

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Additional Writing Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Writing, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Lynne Truss, gravely concerned about our current grammatical state, boldly defends proper punctuation. She proclaims, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. Using examples from literature, history, neighborhood signage, and …

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Bird by Bird

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is "a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps" (Los Angeles Times). “Superb writing advice…. Hilarious, helpful, and provocativ…

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Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters: Storytelling Secrets from the Greatest Mind in Western Civilization

Long considered the bible for storytellers, Aristotle's Poetics is a fixture of college courses on everything from fiction writing to dramatic theory. Now Michael Tierno shows how this great work can be an invaluable resource to screenwriters or anyone interested in studying plot structure. In carefully organized chapters, Tierno breaks down the fundamentals of screenwriting, highlighting part…

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Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose

Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rul…

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Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434

For decades, Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434 class at UCLA has been the premier screenwriting course, launching a generation of the industry's most frequently produced writers. Here, he shares the secrets of his course on the screenwriting process by actually writing an original script, step by step, that appears in the book.

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Making Shapely Fiction

Here is a book about the craft of writing fiction that is thoroughly useful from the first to the last page―whether the reader is a beginner, a seasoned writer, or a teacher of writing. You will see how a work takes form and shape once you grasp the principles of momentum, tension, and immediacy. "Tension," Stern says, "is the mother of fiction. When tension and immediacy combine, the story be…

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Augment your Writing books

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I’ve been an implementer, team lead, consultant, enterprise cloud architect, chief of platforms, and CIO. I have worked for companies like AWS, Lockheed Martin, Puppet, the Federal Government, along with enterprises and startups, and I operate a DevOps transformation consultancy. I've spearheaded datacenter migrations, modernization, and transformation initiatives, guided engineering …

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I am a data scientist and AI Engineer with 6+ years of experience turning data into ROI for businesses by designing AI systems that solve high-impact problems, from fraud detection to customer retention. My experience also includes bridging the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders. I've also written 500+ …

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Sunny Zhu refers to herself as the bridge between people and data and as a “statistics geek”. She has been engaged in a broad range of analytical works across diversified industries to empower companies to turn data insights into solid business decisions. Working for a decade in data analytics, she …

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