Brief time-out: Some helpful books to read as you begin writing

At the risk of enabling your procrastination, I want to take a step back and share some books I found really helpful when I first started to write. Fledgling writers and editors typically think of writing reference books as the style manuals they used in their high school or college term-paper days; manuals like Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, which is really a student’s version of The Chicago Manual of Style. Granted, the latter is widely used in academia and publishing, and you do need to pay attention to the publication’s style—eventually—but I suggest you wait until you are finished writing your story and use those manuals to polish it for submission. (Making an effort to match the style of your target publication makes acceptance much more realistic.)

So here is a short review of and links to my favorite books on writing (I will have more later). Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, is an easy, delightful read that taught me a big lesson: good writing needs practice. The book is full of ideas on how to “jump in and write,” and a selection of these ideas is available online.

Another outstanding book is by William Zinsser, titled On Writing Well. This book is all about nonfiction writing characterized by brevity, clarity, and simplicity, things that are sorely lacking in most journal writing today. Early in the book, he says, “A writer will do anything to avoid the act of writing.” From that point on, I was hooked. As a bonus, he devotes a whole chapter to science and technology, which will make you feel right at home. You can hear an NPR interview with Zinsser here or look for a CD of the book, read by the author, to listen to your car.

If you feel insecure about grammar, go to Woe is I, by Patricia T. O’Connor, a great little book that eased my fears and will ease yours as well. She also has a Web site with sections on myths about grammar, other links on language usage, and a blog with lots of Q&A.

If you are sincerely aiming at medical and nursing journals, go to AMA stat for an overview of the key things you need to know from the new 10th edition (which runs on more than 1000 pages and takes some getting used to). I am forever grateful to the guy who put this together, Abel Scribe, PhD (I’m not sure if this name is a joke, but if so, it’s a good one).

Last (for tonight, anyway; it’s getting late) is one of my favorite references for nurses who want to write nursing articles: Medical English Usage and Abusage by Edith Schwager, who also writes a great column in Q&A format for the American Medical Writers Association's AMWA Journal. You can read a sample of that column here.

Okay, now get back to your idea!