Five Non-Fiction Books for Writers in an Emergency

Not long ago, I finished my first novel.  When I began to actually write it, i.e., to put complete sentences in a semi-coherent order, a strange thing happened: I could not read other people’s fiction.

Whenever I picked up a novel, I would become anxious and unhappy; my mind would race.  I don’t have a better explanation than self-consciousness or maybe envy, but anyway that’s what happened.  So after a post-collegiate lifetime of reading mostly novels, I became for a while a militant reader of everything but fiction.

I emphatically did not read any books about writing fiction, because those have pretty much always made me anxious and unhappy.  Instead, I read non-fiction books that I thought might indirectly tell me something about fiction, even though they were really about something else.  That, it turns out, made all the difference.

Someone told me once that