Or “labour” as we write it here in Canada…

This week’s question on Booking Through Thursday:

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

I’ve studied several editing courses, as well as taken some writing programmes, over the past few years and the best books recommended to me by instructors and fellow students were The Forest For the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott. I highly advise anyone learning to write creatively that they read and reread both books. As well, Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose is a book that every aspiring writer should read. I was speaking with an editor/publisher recently about the authors who had submitted work to her company and she suggested that the most important thing most of them had missed in preparing themselves for the writing life was being well-read - not only in not reading good work in the genre they wished to be published themselves, but also just not reading a lot of good books in general. She told me that many authors say they’re so busy writing that they don’t have time to read… WRONG ANSWER!!! Read, read, read, and then read some more. But make sure you’re reading good books and following their example - not copying them, but trying to understand what makes the books so good in the first place.

As for grammar books, dictionaries, thesauruses (or is that thesauri?) and writing-instruction books, I have some, and most are the standards, but, really and ultimately, that’s what an editor is for and why publishers hire copy editors… It’s important to prove to an editor that you can write a good sentence and know how to spell - for the most part - but what is more important in writing is to prove that you can tell a good story, know how to describe characters and situations, and have the ability to keep a reader engaged from the first sentence to the last words of whatever you write. An editor’s job, in fact, is to fix those words, to tweak them and make them work that much better, but they can only do that, and are only interested in doing that, if you have a great story to tell in the first place.