Happy Campers

I'm willing to concede that writing can't be taught, that there is a sort of "itness," an undefinable literary umami. However, I fully believe editing can be taught. Editing is writing's less glamorous sister. No one likes editing (well, I guess maybe editors), but it's a necessary step in turning good writing into great writing. (Or dreck into something that passes for good writing.) A couple books I've found helpful: Susan Bell's The Artful Edit, and Renni Browne and Dave King's Self-Editing for Fiction Writers. They're both pretty 101, but in all the formal writing classes I've taken, editing was rarely, if ever mentioned.

Another book on the craft of writing I'm enjoying right now is Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream.  I actually don't recommend this to beginning writers -- he's pretty unorthodox but dogmatic in his own unique approach to writing. It's not a book as much as a series of lectures, so it's pretty loose. I like that I do a lot of these things already, and I like that his focus is on literary as opposed to genre fiction.