Books like Trial and error by Jack Woodford

On Writing blends Stephen King’s memoir with practical guidance, offering a personal look at his path to success and essential lessons for aspiring writers.

A practical, humorous guide to writing, Anne Lamott shares her insights, anecdotes and advice on how to tackle any writing project bird by bird, step by step.

Steering the Craft offers practical guidance on fundamental elements of narrative prose, including point of view, sentence structure, syntax, indirect narration, grammar, punctuation, and the musicality of writing.

Writing Fiction is a widely used, nonprofit textbook for creative writers that moves readers from first inspiration through final revision with practical techniques, exercises, and contemporary short‑story examples.

Explore flash fiction mastery through 25 essays by leading authors and critics, offering techniques, insights, and historical context for the short-short story.

Explains the principles and techniques of good writing, and discusses the seven basic technical matters that beginning writers must constantly bear in mind.

A practical guide that helps aspiring writers discover and hone their unique voice through focused exercises, rhetorical techniques, and creative writing strategies for fiction and broader creative expression.

A practical handbook that teaches writers the core elements of fiction—characterization, plot, pacing, and theme—while also covering revision, marketing, and professional tools like cover and query letters.

"All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.". "How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the reliable narrator who will tell the story that needs to be told? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks, and answers. Using some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Vivian Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, and Oscar Wilde.". "This book, which grew out of fifteen years of teaching in M.F.A. programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own."--BOOK JACKET.