I’m a sucker for how-to-write books. I buy them and put them on the shelf above the desk where I write. I seldom read them, but they admonish me to do my best when I add words to words to make sentences, and add sentences to sentences to make whatever that makes.
In general, I doubt that you can learn how to write by reading how-to-write books. You learn to write by reading. Reading stocks your mind with words, phrases, rhythms. When you write, you draw on your store of stocked words, phrases and rhythms. I marvel at the scandals surrounding published authors who fail to footnote everything in the books that they write. Plagiarism, they call it. Well, in academic writing I suppose it’s important to acknowledge your sources. But it’s all plagiarism. Alexander Pope stole from Isaac Watts, a hymn writer whom he mocked, and made brilliant poetry out of what he stole. Should we regret that Pope was a thief?
End of digression. There is one how-to-write book that did make a difference in how I write. If it hasn’t made me a good writer, it has kept me from being a much worse one. This book is The Reader Over Your Shoulder: A Handbook for Writers of English Prose, by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. Graves was a poet andbthevauthor of I, Claudius and other historical novels. Hodge was a literary editor.
“as a result of having read [it]…I have taken about three times as long to write this review as is normal, and still dread committing it to print”.
The point of the book is not that writing well requires abilities superior to those possessed by Shaw, Eliot, and the other “fair copies” but that anyone, whatever their abilities, will write badly if they don’t pay close attention to
Books Matter 
Why, it’s a miracle that any great writing got done over the past few thousand years without the benefit of being spawned by and then studied in literary theory courses. And there I’ll end the sarcasm. If you want to write, do two things: first, read as much of the great ones as you can — read your ass off — and, second, see then if you have something to say that beguiles even you.
LikeLike
Well put, as always.
LikeLike