Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing, Claire Kehrwald Cook,Houghton Mifflin
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, William Fowler, Oxford Univ. Press
The Careful Writer, Theodore M. Bernstein, Atheneum
The Practical Stylist, Sheridan Baker, Harper & Row
The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Times Books (also The Well-Tempered Sentence by her)
The Elements of Style, Strunk & White
Writing better fiction:
Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, Nancy Kress, Writer’s Digest Books
Creating Short Fiction, Damon Knight, St. Martin’s
On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner, Harper & Row
The Art of Creative Writing, Lajos Egri (may be OOP)
Techniques of the Selling Writer, Dwight V. Swain
Science Fiction Writers Workshop I: An Introduction to Fiction Mechanics, Barry B. Longyear
How to Write a Damn Good Novel II,James N. Frey. St. Martins 1994, ISBN 0-312-10478-2
Characters and Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card
Writing better speculative fiction:
The Craft of Science Fiction, Reginald Bretnor
Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (recently reprinted)
Paragons, ed. Robin Scott Wilson
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, Orson Scott Card, Writer’s Digest Books
Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, editors of Analog and Asimov’s
Aliens and Alien Societies, ed. Ben Bova, Writer’s Digest Books
Creating the Heavens, Melissa Scott, Heinemann
Style manuals (cover grammar, punctuation, usage, treatment of names and terms, editing stages, book production):
The Chicago Manual of Style, University of Chicago
Words into Type, Prentice Hall
A Manual of Style (U.S. Govt Printing Office), Gramercy
The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage
This page was last modified on Tuesday January 04 2005.
Featured Book
Miriam Randle undertakes short-term time travel to undo crimes that have already occurred. But when she commits a murder she was meant to avert, she must flee into the past to unravel a conspiracy before fellow agents track her down.
Author of the Halberd series (Gallantry in Action, In Harm’s Way, True Allegiance, and Surrender Demand) and the Sandy Pike series (Pike’s Potential–Cygnus Award semifinalist, Pike’s Passage–BookLife Prize finalist, and Pike’s Progress).