Read the Way You Write: Classify It, Deconstruct It, Play with It
To take the best advantage of your reading for your writing, I recommend keeping a reading journal. In it, you can keep track of what you like, play with particular paragraphs to figure out how they work, and experiment with the styles and ideas you read about to improve your own writing.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED IN BOOKS
Tom Bissell on John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist
It is probably the most important book I have ever read — or rather the most important book ever read by the aspiring writer who became the person writing this sentence. Gardner, an erratically brilliant novelist, solid short-story writer, under appreciated critic, legendary creative-writing teacher, habitual animadvert, massive hypocrite, and awe-inspiring pain in the ass, died in a motorcycle accident at the age of 49 in 1982, having written more than thirty books; Novelist is one of the last he completed.
Writing Prompt: The Alter Ego
Research the origins (Latin, Greek, biblical, or otherwise) of your first name and develop an alter ego for yourself based on what you find.
Paraphrased from Poets & Writers
36 Adjectives Describing Light
A bright constellation of adjectives referring to various qualities of light, or other phenomena related to light, is brought to light in the list below. Quite a few of them, fromlucent to lustrous (and evenilluminating), stem from the Latin word lucere, meaning “to shine,” while many others begin with the consonant gl-, betraying their descent from a proto-Germanic word with the same meaning.
