10 Anthologies About Writing

It is quite possible to spend the rest of your life reading about how to write and never get around to actually writing — especially with so many convenient collections of writers’ ruminations like the ones listed and described below.

1. Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave
Twenty-six authors share confessions about their transgressions in this collection.

2. Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers
Mystery writer Stuart Kaminsky’s conversations with friends and colleagues — from old-school authors like Elmore Leonard and Mickey Spillane to more recent talents such as Sue Grafton and Tony Hillerman — are distinguished from similar interviews by their informality.

3. The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction and Poetry
Beginning, intermediate, and expert writers alike will benefit from this assortment of advice and activities from a diverse array of published authors.

4. The Paris Review Interviews
This four-volume set, also available in individual volumes, features interviews with a who’s who of twentieth-century literature by George Plimpton, longtime editor of the Paris Review.

5. The Resilient Writer: Tales of Rejection and Triumph by 23 Top Authors
Arthur Golden, Bret Easton Ellis, Amy Tan, and a score of other successful writers share the agony of rejection and the ecstasy of acceptance.

6. Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do
Twenty top writers answer a set of ten questions about their motivations for writing and about the favorite and least favorite aspects of their work.

7. Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times

8. Writers on Writing, Volume II: More Collected Essays from The New York Times
In these two collections of essays originally published in the New York Times in its weekly “Writers on Writing” feature, some of the greatest writers of our age explore both the practical and the artistic aspects of what it means to be a writer.

9. Writers On Writing: A Bread Loaf Anthology
Twenty-five poets, short story writers, and novelists offer a series of literary workshops in book form, sharing their thoughts about the writing process.

10. The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work
This collection of entries of “The Writing Life,” a Washington Post column, shares the thoughts of dozens of celebrated fiction and nonfiction writers.