I deleted this first sentence at least ten times before settling on this one. Sometimes the words just don’t want to come. You can’t get them to arrange in a way that is satisfying. Sure, you can go back during edits to fix all the bits that came out stilted or wrong in some indefinable way, but having to slog through each sentence is a sure way to lose steam during a writing session.
There’s lots of advice out there for breaking through writer’s block—go for a walk, bake a cake, practice free writing—but sometimes you need to read some well-written prose to remind yourself what beautiful writing looks like. You probably have some favourites of your own, some books and authors who represent everything you aspire to achieve as a writer. Below are six books that I always turn to when I need writing inspiration.
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6 Books to Inspire Your Writing
Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson
All graveyards should have moss-covered trees creaking in the wind and the sound of the waves grating the round stones on the beach. The trees are so high and large here that under this canopy, even the brightest day is pale. Wander slowly, careful where you step. No neat row of crosses, no meticulous lawn, no carefully tended flowers will guide you. Too sterile, antiseptic. Headstones carved into eagles, blackfish, ravens, beavers appear seemingly at random. In the time of the great dying, whole families were buried in one plot. Pick wild blueberries when you’re hungry, let the tart taste sink into your tongue, followed by that sharp sweetness that store-bought berries lack. Realize that the pumplest berries are over the graves.
I first read Monkey Beach as part of my major research paper for my masters degree. As such, I had to read it multiple times. Each time I fell a little more in love with it. The novel follows Indigenous teen Lisamarie in the search for her missing brother, moving back and forth between the present and Lisamarie’s past. Eden Robinson weaves supernatural elements and Haisla culture into a story of family secrets and trauma to deliver an incredible novel of loss and hope.
Robinson uses deceptively simple prose to breathe life into the landscape of her stories. She uses a second person imperative point of view at key moments in the novel to both pull the reader in and hold them at a distance, highlighting all the things the reader does not, or even cannot, know. She maintains this balance throughout the novel and it’s a feat of storytelling that I come back to again and again.
Jazz by Toni Morrison
I’m crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It’s the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I’m strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible—like the City in 1926 when all the wars are over and there will never be another one.
Jazz was the first Toni Morrison I ever read and I distinctly remember how those first few pages hit me right in the gut. It’s an impossible book to summarize, moving back and forth through time to tell a story of love and obsession, hope and injustice, against the backdrop of Jazz Age Harlem.
To read Toni Morrison is to read a master at work. She imbues a sweeping sense of mythos into everything she writes. Her prose in Jazz mimics the rhythm and spontaneity of jazz itself. It remains one of my favourite Morrison novels and it’s one that I revisit often to remind myself what writing can do.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.
Speaking of gut punches, where do I even begin talking about The God of Small Things? Set in India in 1969, Arundhati Roy tells the story of twins, Rahel and Estha, as they navigate a childhood shaped by the complexities and dysfunctions of their family and the society in which they find themselves.
Like Robinson, Arundhati Roy is a master at evoking setting, and like Morrison, she infuses a sense of mythos into her story. The God of Small Things is both sweeping and intimate. I’ve never read anything else like it. Roy’s writing is nothing short of breathtaking. It’s the kind of narrative that demands to be savoured, each sentence is so carefully crafted to build a stunning and devastating whole.
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Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente
That’s how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you’d have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part, and say your lines.
I have never been disappointed by a Catherynne Valente novel, but Deathless was my first and my favourite. This is another one that I’ve read multiple times. Valente reimagines Russian folklore into a sweeping, blood-soaked fairytale that spans Russia’s tumultuous history through the life of Marya Morevna, bride of Koschei the Deathless. Magic resides, always just beneath the surface, in Valente’s story of war and love and revolution.
No one writes like Catherynne M. Valente. Some may call her prose flowery, but I can’t get enough of it. She does things with the English language that I didn’t even know were possible and reading her work is an experience in surprise and delight.
This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
You wish you could hold me at knifepoint again. You do, still, in a way. So long as I bear these last three seeds in a hollow behind my eye, you are a blade against my back. I love the danger of it. Besides, I am not so naive as to think your posting to this strand entirely lacks purpose. Your Garden works slowly, works through lives. It burrows you deep, and through you wreaks great change, while we strive upon the surface. And in your absence you are deadly as a blade.
It’s hard to believe I read this book just this year. I feel like it’s lived inside me a lot longer than that. This Is How You Lose the Time War is written as a back and forth between two characters known only as Blue and Red. They are fighters on opposite sides of a time war, corresponding through a series of letters, and what unfolds is an intimate and tender love story.
The details of this time war are limited and the worlds of these characters are never fully detailed, but the writing is pure poetry. The letters are lyrical and gorgeous, grounding the reader in a slowly blossoming relationship amid a disorienting backdrop. I loved every glorious moment of it.
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Welty himself used to talk about fateful objects. Every dealer and antiquaire recognizes them. The pieces that occur and recur. Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.
The Goldfinch is one of my favourite novels. The story follows Theo, beginning with his mother’s death in an explosion at the Met, moving through his tumultuous childhood, and into adulthood, where he has fallen into a life of drug use and forgery. All the while Theo is accompanied by a small painting that he rescued from the museum—“The Goldfinch” by Carel Fabritius.
Donna Tartt crafts an exquisite story of love, loss, and art with The Goldfinch. I could pull any number of passages from it to exemplify her writing, but the one above has stuck with me since the second I read it. With it, she captures the way that art—whether it be a painting, a book, a piece of music–can stay with us and burrow into our very souls.
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Stories to Inspire
There’s something all these books have in common, besides the beautiful writing. They each have a sweeping sense of myth about them. They are capital ‘S’ Stories. The kind that endure. That you can retread any number of times and find something both new and familiar. It’s why I find inspiration in them. Not only do these writers have an incredible handle on prose, they also craft an impeccably structured tale. And what’s more inspirational than that?
Which books do you read to inspire your writing? Tell us in the comments below or drop us a line at hello@anotherbookontheshelf.com
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