My favorite is "Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace" by Joseph Williams. I love it because it shows you why some sentences suck and some shine like gold. The book is intended for academic writing, but the lessons it provides are translatable to fiction writing.
A Good book for writers "WRITER'S MIND Crafting fiction" by Richard Cohen. This is a great book. He covers everything from plot and character developement to narrative distance. From outline and first draft to final revisions. Published by NTC Publishing Group Dale
What about novels and short stories collection from the author you absolutely hate? Even if those books couldn't give you a dime on how to write. It's guaranteed that you'll try your damnest not to write like that.
In fact writing must happen naturally and spontaneously. Today you have piles of books opinionating things and they simply cloud your minds with their trashes. Think about Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Sartre. How they ended up writing some of the best classics we have today? Were they formulaically writing? In fact we have not read enough and practiced enough or else we would have stacked ourselves with so many rules on writing. Things come on their own. Let us read and reread some of the best books and our ideas become balanced and structured into best books. Today we have many things to do. We are too much more engrossed in things and than our predecessors. We have to divide our time amongst many things and we have the least amount for reading and writing. We simply want a set of formulas and rules that help us write a book. We are well-resourced compared with our predecessors. If I want to write a book I have so many accesses. I can easily access a number of dictionaries, books of Usage, reference books or guidebooks. What is more writing using Microsoft is far easier. I can have with the comforts of laptops, Ipads and the like which my parents or grandparents could not dream of. Yet they came up with better books. I feel what we lack is commitment and perseverance and that drove us behind.
