GenresNon-fiction
Creativity & Writing
The work of making things with words — or without.
Books about writing and creativity are read by people who already suspect that advice is easy and pages are not. They have heard that they should write every day, kill their darlings, and believe in themselves. A useful book gets past the posters. It shows what a drafting process looks like on a particular kind of work, a novel, a script, a poem, a submission to an agent, and it is honest about the parts that are slow, technical, and unmagical.
Examples do more than encouragement. If you are talking about structure, show a structure. If you are talking about a sentence, quote one and say what it is doing. Your own career can be part of the evidence, and it shouldn't be the whole argument, because the reader is not you and the market they are walking into may not be the one you walked into. Practical chapters on publishing, money, and the life around the desk belong here as much as chapters on inspiration. Leave the reader with something to try on the next page they write.
The kinds of book inside it
Writing a novel
The long form is the subject, from the idea to the draft to the revision, with enough specificity that a novelist can borrow a method.
Getting published
How a manuscript meets the trade, including queries, agents, contracts, and the parts of the process a writer can actually influence.
Poetry
Technique in poems, line and image and form, taught so that a reader could go and try the thing rather than only admire it.
Creative process
The wider habit of making, which needs practices and a realistic account of resistance, not only a celebration of being creative.
Screenwriting
Script craft has its own shapes, and the book should talk about scenes, structure, and the industry without pretending the template is the talent.
When you want a first sketch, Storywell can draft a contents list in this vein. You are still the one who writes the book. Compose an idea.