If you give a writer one of the four famous books on writing, you’re probably handing over a duplicate. Anybody who’s been writing for more than a year owns all four, and two of them they were given twice.
I don’t hold anything against those four books.
They’re famous because they’re good. The trouble is information: the person buying doesn’t know what the writer already has, so they default to the titles that surface first, and the writer ends up with duplicates and a polite face. That’s a pity, because the people buying mean well, and the right book at the right moment can carry a writer through a bad month.
The better way to shop is by what the writer is currently stuck on, because that’s the information a gift-giver usually does have. You’ve probably heard them complain about something, and that complaint is your shopping list.
What do you give a writer who is stuck?
A book about how somebody else got unstuck. Another manual on how to write is the last thing they need. Writers who can’t start have generally read the instructional material and it didn’t help, because the problem is rarely technique. What tends to move somebody is a working writer being honest about their own bad periods, at length, without turning it into an inspirational arc. Published notebooks and journals do this better than craft books. So do collections of letters between writers, which are frequently full of complaint, envy and stalled projects, and which have the enormous advantage of not being addressed to you.
The other thing that helps a stuck writer is a book in a form they don’t work in. A novelist reading poetry, a nonfiction writer reading plays. The pressure of the unfamiliar form breaks a habit loose in a way another novel won’t.
What do you give a writer who wants to get better at sentences?
Something with a strong voice they can steal from, and one technical book.
The technical side is small. There are perhaps half a dozen useful books about prose at the sentence level, and after that you’re into repetition. Anything that walks through real sentences and explains what the choices are doing will serve. Anything that offers rules without examples won’t. The larger half is exposure. A writer improves at sentences by reading writers whose sentences are doing something, and the useful gift is a stylist they haven’t read. Someone with a completely different rhythm than their own.
The point is that a reader with only one tone in their ear writes in one tone.
I’ve written about their techniques in the pieces on Wilde, Hemingway and Orwell, and any of those three is a reasonable place to start looking for a stylist to give.
What do you give a writer who is thinking about publishing?
Something about the business, and it has to be current.
This is the category where the usual gifts fail hardest, because publishing information rots. A book about the industry from six years ago describes a market that no longer exists, and giving one is worse than giving nothing because the writer may act on it.
This one is reckless. Stale advice about contracts and platforms costs writers money and years, and nobody puts a warning label on the cover.
Check the publication date. If it’s more than about three years old and the subject is contracts, platforms, marketing or self-publishing mechanics, put it back. What doesn’t rot is anything about how the industry works structurally: what an agent does, what an advance is, why rights matter, how a publisher decides. That material stays true across decades because the shape of the business changes slowly even when the tools change fast.
What do you give a writer who has just finished something?
Not a craft book. They’ve had enough instruction. Somebody who has just completed a draft is depleted and usually a little lost, and the correct gift is something to read for pleasure with no obligation attached. A novel in a genre they enjoy and don’t write. A long piece of narrative nonfiction. Something they wouldn’t have bought themselves.
The second good option is a beautiful copy of something they already love. A working writer’s own library is usually paperbacks with broken spines, and a well-made edition of a book they’ve read four times is a gift that acknowledges the reading instead of pushing them back toward the desk.
The instinct to give a productivity book at this moment is strong and it’s wrong. They just produced something.
What books should a beginning writer read?
This is the one case where the famous titles are the right answer, because they won’t own them yet.
Somebody in their first year needs permission more than technique. The useful books at that stage are the ones that establish that the work is hard for everybody, that first drafts are supposed to be bad, and that the gap between what they meant and what appeared on the page is universal instead of a personal failing.
What they don’t need is anything about publishing, agents, marketing or platform. A beginner given a book about the industry will spend six months thinking about a business they haven’t yet made a product for. That’s the most common way a first project dies.
They also don’t need craft books plural. One is a resource. Four is a way of postponing the writing, and the person receiving them will feel obliged to work through the stack before starting.
If you’re buying for a beginner, one instructional book and one novel is a better shape than two instructional books.
Do audiobooks and ebooks work as gifts?
Both work, with different failure modes.
Audiobooks are excellent for writers, because prose read aloud exposes rhythm in a way silent reading doesn’t. A writer who listens to a well-narrated book is getting a technical education without effort. The catch is that a great deal depends on the narrator, and a bad reading ruins a good book.
Ebooks are the weakest gift in the category, and the problem is the gesture. A file arriving by email doesn’t read as a present, and the writer will forget it’s there. If you’re giving digitally, say what it is and why you picked it, because a physical book usually does that work for you.
The strongest digital version is a subscription that removes a friction: a library service, a research database, a good dictionary. Those get used daily and nobody buys them for themselves.
What do you give a writer who reads everything already?
Go sideways into a subject instead of deeper into writing. The best gifts I’ve received are books about work I know nothing about. How something is manufactured, how an investigation runs, what a job involves at the level of daily detail. Writers consume this material constantly because everything is potential material, and the well-informed book about an unfamiliar trade is far more useful than another book about craft.
Reference books also work better than people expect. Skip the general dictionary, since everybody has one, and look for the specific ones: a book of period slang, a field guide to one region, a detailed history of an ordinary object.
The test is whether it contains facts they couldn’t easily search for. A book that assembles scattered information in one place has a use that a web search doesn’t replace.
What writing gifts reliably go wrong?
Three categories, and they’re given constantly. The famous craft book they already own. Ask, or give something else. There’s no graceful way to receive a duplicate, and you’ll both know it.
The notebook nobody will use. Expensive blank books are given to writers more than any other object, and most working writers draft on a screen. A beautiful notebook is a lovely thing and a mild obligation, and the person who receives it will feel guilty every time it sits there empty. I’ve never understood why a gift should come with homework.
Anything with a writing quotation printed on it. Mugs, prints, tote bags, magnets. The quotations are usually misattributed, frequently to Twain or Wilde, who between them said perhaps a third of what they’re credited with, and a writer will notice.
What is the single best gift for a writer?
Time, and it’s not a joke answer.
The constraint on nearly every writer who’s not producing is hours. Knowledge, equipment and motivation are rarely what’s missing. Anybody who can hand a writer an uninterrupted stretch has given them the only thing the bookshop doesn’t stock. I’d trade a whole shelf of craft books for one clear weekend.
The practical versions are unglamorous. Taking the children for a weekend. Covering something they’d otherwise have to do. Booking two nights somewhere quiet. Doing the thing on their list that’s been blocking the desk.
If it’s to be an object, the closest equivalents are things that remove friction: a better chair, a second screen, decent headphones, a subscription that ends a recurring annoyance.
I think people underrate this gift because it doesn’t come wrapped. A cleared afternoon tells a writer you take the work seriously, and very few people in a writer’s life ever say that out loud.
How do you find out which writing books a writer already owns?
Ask somebody else, or ask them badly on purpose. The direct question ruins the surprise. The indirect version doesn’t: ask what they’re reading, what they gave up on recently, whose sentences they envy. Writers answer all three at length and the answers narrow the field enormously.
If you have access to their shelves, photograph them. Ten minutes with that photograph will tell you more than any recommendation list, including this one. I’d much prefer a writer get one book they’ll read to pieces over three they already own, and the only way to manage that is to pay attention to the person before you pay attention to the bestseller table.
For individual titles, my own catalog is at the library, and the reading recommendations by subject are in timeless stories and the October plan.
