Noah Lukeman is a successful literary agent, with plenty of experience rejecting manuscripts. In The First Five Pages he shares that experience with the reader, giving good advice about how a manuscript can be improved in the revision process to make it more likely to be accepted. If you’re thinking of doing your own editing, read this first.

"There are two kinds of editors. One sticks in that wherever it will fit. The other kind takes it out. They’re both wrong." — P. T. O’Connor

Woe is I is subtitled “The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English,” and I can’t describe it better than that. O’Connor solves many of the stranger mysteries of English (“He resents me going” or “He resents my going”?) without resorting to the vocabulary of a high-school English teacher.

The last chapter, “Saying is Believing,” is a witty guide to making your writing clear.
These thirteen points, starting with “say what you have to say,” and “stop when you’ve said it,” give the writer concrete ways to improve his writing. These ten short pages are enough, on their own, to make the book worth reading and taking to heart.

"A merely good piece of description can be transformed into a memorable one by cutting away what disguises it." — T.R.A. Cheney

Getting the Words Right is full of detailed explanations of how revision can improve a piece of writing. I’m especially fond of the first section, "Reduce". (For more on that topic, see my article, "Samurai Editing".)

But the later sections, "Rearrange" and "Reword", are terrific as well, with plenty of concrete suggestions to make your writing shine. While some authors make recommendations that seem too vague to follow, Cheney doesn’t just tell writers to, for example, revise their word order. He tells how to do that, giving several examples of poor word order, and making clear just how and why he would revise them.

If you’re hoping to improve your writing, or just to understand what good editing is all about, this book will help.

I was talking to a friend about this, and I said I was trying to figure out how to make those moments come. She told me that she listens to music (especially movie music), and then she recommended Writing Down the Bones.

And there it was, on page 11:

“…I attempted several times a month to write about my father dying. I was exploring and composting the material. Then suddenly, and I can’t say how, in December I sat transfixed at the Croissant Express in Minneapolis and a long poem about that subject poured out of me. All the disparate things I had to say were suddenly fused with energy and unity—a bright red tulip shot out of the compost.”

She shares with us the wisdom of her Zen master — teacher — Katagiri Roshi, who told her “It is very deep to have a cup of tea.” Don’t believe it’s all so esoteric, though: At another moment, when she’d asked him about feelings of oneness and enlightenment that overtook her each time she tried to write, he told her “Oh, it’s just laziness. Get to work.”

Natalie Goldberg’s book will help get you unstuck just when you need it.

It’s not really as scary as it looks. You can get an idea of the common-sense approach the Chicago people take by checking out their Q&A page.

Sure, there are more user-friendly options for writers, but for the professional editor, The Chicago Manual is indispensable. I use it to jog my memory, to solve sticky problems (like how to hyphenate “early twenty-first-century French furniture”) and to help with style decisions, along with The Associated Press Stylebook and others.