There are two kinds of books about writing: craft manuals that tell you how to structure a sentence or a scene, and books by writers about what writing is for — what demands it makes, what it requires you to know about yourself, and why anyone would do it. The first category has its uses. The second category is worth reading even if you don't write, because it is really about thought: what it means to take an idea seriously enough to subject it to the pressure of sustained articulation.
James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son is the best example of writing that argues, through its own practice, for a position about what writing must do. Baldwin believed that the writer's obligation was honesty — not therapeutic self-expression but the more demanding kind that requires you to know what you actually think, to follow that thought to its uncomfortable conclusion, and to present it without the evasions that social life makes habitual. The essays in Notes of a Native Son — on race, on American culture, on his own family — demonstrate what that honesty looks like in practice. The prose is controlled and precise; the moral seriousness is absolute; the conclusions are not reassuring. This is what writing looks like when it is practiced as a vocation rather than a profession. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries it alongside The Fire Next Time.
Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem contains, in its preface, one of the most honest accounts of how a writer actually works: Didion describes the difficulty of assembling coherent meaning from the "shimmer" of reality, the way the essays came out of an inability to make sense of California in the 1960s through any other means. The essays themselves are the argument: they demonstrate what Didion's particular form of attention — to surface details, to the gap between language and event, to the personal as a route into the political — produces when applied to the counterculture, the Manson family, the specific textures of a place and time. For writers, the book is as instructive as any craft manual, and more interesting. The essays and memoir shelf carries it.
David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster includes "Authority and American Usage," a thirty-thousand-word essay nominally about a usage dictionary that is actually about the relationship between language, authority, and the reader — about why a writer's choices of register, tone, and diction are not aesthetic preferences but moral positions. Wallace is arguing that how you write is an argument about your relationship with your reader: whether you are speaking to them as an equal, as a superior, as a seducer, as a supplicant. The essay enacts its argument; the prose style is itself a demonstration of the ethics it describes. The essays and memoir shelf at byallo carries Consider the Lobster.
Annie Dillard's The Writing Life (1989) is the most honest short book about the experience of writing fiction and nonfiction — honest specifically about the difficulty, the false starts, the self-deception, the long periods of not knowing what you are doing and continuing anyway. Dillard wrote it in the years after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and it shares that book's quality of attending to a practice until its structure becomes visible. She describes a summer spent trying to write a book that wasn't working and eventually discovering what the book required — a section that had to be cut even though it was the best writing in the manuscript. The argument is simple: writing requires you to serve the work, not yourself, and the work will ask you to do things that are difficult.
Strunk and White's The Elements of Style is a different kind of book — a genuine craft manual — and it earns its place on a list of books about writing by being genuinely useful rather than merely authoritative. The edition currently in print is not much changed from the original 1918 pamphlet William Strunk wrote for his Cornell students. Its virtues are negative ones: prefer the specific to the general, use the active voice, omit needless words. These are not aesthetic preferences but instructions for clarity — for writing that does what it intends without wasted effort. Read it once a year. It takes two hours.
Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet is the most useful book for anyone asking why they write or whether they should. Rilke's advice to the young poet Franz Kappus — who wrote asking for criticism of his poems — is essentially that the question of whether to write is the wrong question: the right question is whether you can not write, and if the answer is no, you have your answer. Rilke is not encouraging anyone to pursue a literary career; he is describing a compulsion. For people who write, the letters are accurate. For people who read, they are an account of what drives the writers whose work they are reading.
The books on this list share a quality that separates them from most writing advice: they treat writing as a practice with moral dimensions, not a skill set. The technical questions — sentence structure, scene construction, argument organization — are real and worth learning. But the prior question — what is this for, and what does it require of me? — is the one these books address, and it is the question that eventually determines whether the technical skills are used well.