With a new year often comes new ambitions for the days ahead. Whether it’s been your lifelong dream to pen a novel, or a more recent goal to spend more time being creative in 2024, here are six books to motivate and inspire you on your journey.
If you’ve ever wondered about where the mysterious Murakami gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds, look no further. In Novelist as a Vocation What I Talk About When I Talk About Running .
Looking for a more instructive guide to the fiction writing process? In the tradition of E M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel The Art of the Novel , this book is a study in the main elements of fiction, such as narrative detail, characterisation, dialogue, realism and style, making it the perfect pick for anyone who’s just getting started.
In homage the old adage of the best writers also being the most widely read, we encourage you to pick up books that will inspire your own work, too—like this haunting and affecting mediation on love from Toni Morrison? This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of live is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be.
Rather than looking at the elements that are put together to creative a captivating story, in The Art of Fiction
Drawing not only from Kennedy’s hugely popular blog, On Writing
No list for aspiring writers would be complete without an inclusion of Virginia Woolf. This Classics volume combines two books which were among the great contributions to feminist literature this century, and together they form a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. As the Guardian states, after reading this collection ‘one realises afresh the full meaning of originality, the magic of the mind which plays around concrete facts as though they were all spirit.’
