Books like Writing personal essays by Sheila Bender

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.

The Artist’s Way offers a practical, twelve‑week guide of creative exercises and reflective practices designed to help writers, musicians, painters and other artists unlock and sustain their creative potential.

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.

"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.

A practical guide that distills 15 years of teaching into exercises and examples, taking writers from the spark of an idea through to polished manuscripts.