One of my biggest mistakes that lasted a very long time was my absolute refusal to actually read creative writing books. Now, that’s not to say that I didn’t own Creative Writing books because I did. I owned a metric ton of creative writing  books – I just never read them. Okay, I read the Chicago Manual of Style while I was doing edits to check out a bit on comma usage. If you count reading five pages of an enormous book that can be used as a weapon during a mugging as reading then yeah I read it.

See the thing is I was sort of afraid of the craft books. Because the one thing you learn when you read a craft book, or take a good class about craft, is that you really don’t know all that much when you first start out. In fact if you’re like me you know how to string together the basics of a plot and that’s about it and most the time you’re guessing.

But you know what happens when you don’t learn what your craft is? You find yourself behind the 8 ball, rewriting drafts over and over again before you send them to your editor. Then, after all those rewrites your editor sends the story back and you do another two rounds of rewrites so that the story you send no longer resembles the story you sent in and it has nothing to do with the first rough draft you wrote. One year later the stories look nothing alike and  you wonder how much more you could have gotten done if you wouldn’t  have written sixteen drafts of the same novel. And if you’d no longer hate your characters. Because let me tell you, after 9 drafts of Luck of the Devil I couldn’t even think about writing the sequel, Devil May Care. I just couldn’t face it. For three months not only did I not face it, every time I sat down at the computer to write and try to face it I froze.

You don’t want to waste all that time rewriting the same story over and over. You’re a career writer not a one hit wonder. You have a career to build and that’s by having a backlist not by putting out one measly book. And you don’t want to face crippling writer’s block. Not this way at least.

So let go of your fear of learning the craft. Let go of that feeling of inferiority because you don’t know what you’re doing. Accept it. Embrace it. And learn as much as you can now, in the early stages of your career, so you can amaze the world with not just your story but your grasp of techniques as well.

If you don’t have an MFA in Creative Writing. Join me over here in the “went to college to get a degree that paid the bills” bench. Comfortable? Are you sure? Because we have snacks if you need one. Now, pick up one of those craft books and get to work. It’s time to catch up and learn the craft. Because while reading a dozen craft books won’t turn a crappy story idea into gold or get you a publishing contract it definitely can’t hurt.

If you’re looking for some books to start your craft book collection here are some I recommend from my recent spate of craft reading:

Story Engineering by Larry Brooks (This is available on the Kindle Lending Library if you’re cheap like me).

Save The Cat by Blake Snyder

The Chicago Manual of Style

Plot, Scene, and Structure by James Scott Bell