I recently checked out Noble's Book of Writing Blunders (and how to avoid them) by William Noble. It's a fairly small book with very basic pointers on writing for beginning writers. I felt a lot of the information could have been covered in a short list with one or two sentence explanation, but Noble dedicated an entire chapter to each and included examples of what to do or not do. The chapters cover topics like "Don't Overuse the Thesaurus", "Don't Underuse the Dictionary", don't write the way you learned in elementary school, go easy on adjectives and adverbs, use proper punctuation. This is all quite useful for someone just starting to write, but not for writers with a fair amount of experience. Noble also writes in a very easy to read style and presents the information in an interesting way, so it's not dull in spite of the straightforward content.
Another book I've acquired is The Writer's Idea Book, by Jack Heffron. It is both more and less than I expected. I thougth it would just be a book of random writing prompts, but it is organized into sections of various kinds of prompts: prompts to help you develop a writing routine, explore your personal style, organize your thoughts or story ideas and dozens of others. Many serve as excercises to practice skills like creating characters, using description and humor, or exploring analogies and metaphors. The book doesn't just give ideas, it shows the writer how to use the prompts to work through difficulties and improve their writing in general. Its usefulness is increased by the way it is organized, allowing the user to ignore what they don't feel they need and find help they are looking for a particular area. This book is a valuable resource for any writer.
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