Books to Inspire Your Best Writing

With the new year, one of your resolutions may be to get to your writing desk more often, and write faster and better, and more! If you’re like me, it helps if you have a little inspiration to get going. I believe in reading as preparation for writing, and want to share with you some of my favorite books for getting the writerly juices flowing.

Five Great Books To Get You Writing

Julia Cameron The Right to Write This is a book of short essays revolving around subjects such as claiming the right to express yourself, “bad” writing, and connecting with a greater power for your writing life. It also includes terrific end-of-essay exercises to help you along the path.

Julia Cameron The Sound of Paper. Similar to The Right to Write in regards to the essays and exercises, this book goes even deeper. Julia Cameron shares her life—the times spent between New York and Taos, New Mexico. Inspiring and often lyrical, it’s a pleasure to spend time with this book.

Judy Reeve’s A Writer’s Book of Days. Providing daily encouragement, inspiration, and writing prompts, this book will help you develop a writing practice. So that by writing steadily and faithfully, even if it’s just a few paragraphs at a time, you’ll end up with more completed stories, poems, and novels than you can imagine.

Judy Reeves—Wild Women, Wild Voices Do you have a little wildness inside that needs to be written? Inside each of us is an authentic voice that is, as Reeves explains, “untamed and unbounded and holds the possibility of great beauty.” Reading Wild Women, Wild Voices helps us connect with and write from that voice.

Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge poemcrazy. Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird describes poemcrazy as “smart, wide-eyed, joyful, helpful, inspiring.” Whenever I spend a little time with Wooldridge, I feel a little more hopeful about my writing life, a little more inspired. And more often than not, I end up writing a new poem.

Lastly, let me mention Becky Breed’s and my book, Writing in Community. Our book champions generative writing and shows how you can go deep and write as you did not think possible. Follow this link to take a look.

Creative Exercise. As we start the new year, it’s time to do a little dreaming as to what we’d like the new year to hold. But let’s look beyond the usual “get in better shape” type of goals. Think, instead, about exciting new things you might like to try. Maybe you’d like to try your hand at memoir or look at joining a writer’s group. Perhaps you’d like to collaborate with a visual artist and write an illustrated book of poetry. Number from 1 to 5, and complete this phrase:

This year I’d like to ___________________________________________________