National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is five days old, but it’s not too late too look up these reference books to help you on your path to 50,000 words.
Heath, Chip and Dan Heath. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. New York, NY: Random House, 2008.
A book about ideas and rhetoric, Made to Stick tackles what makes an idea memorable to a reader. With their SUCCES anagram, you’ll learn how to shape your story in a way that engages your audience’s felt needs.
Kiteley, Brian. The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises that Transform Your Fiction. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 2005.
Divided into twenty categories, including point of view, sentence structure, time, and childhood, Kiteley’s writing exercises are perfectly tuned to jumpstart your writing brain. Stumped on a chapter? Find a relevant exercise to get your creative juices flowing.
Check out The 3 A.M. Epiphany→
Ackerman, Angela and Becca Puglisi. The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Expression. JADD Publishing, 2019.
Do you catch yourself writing bland sentences like “Kenzie was angry”? Or are you desperate for a way to show a character’s mirth besides skimming your thesaurus for yet another synonym for laugh (Chortle? Snicker? Guffaw?)? Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi to the rescue! This helpful reference lists 130 common emotional states with their associated physical behaviors and internal and mental responses.
Check out The Emotion Thesaurus→
Lukeman, Noah. A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2007.
Last but not least, for those pesky grammar conundrums, A Dash of Style is the perfect resource. To comma or not to comma? Is that actually a sentence? Would it be a terrible choice to put a colon there? Noah Lukeman delivers the answers in an engaging, understandable format.