I just read a wonderful new writer’s second draft of her novel and one of my suggestions for strengthening her prose was to substitute weak adverb/verb combos for more compelling adverbs/verbs.  Unlike certain famous authors who disdain adjectives and modifiers, I believe they have their place, and if modifiers and adjectives are good, they hook the reader’s attention. So here are my go-to books on verbs and style that sit on my bookshelf and should sit on yours as well (plus a few more on creativity).

Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives is fun and enlightening, with an incredible array of fresh superlatives that get your brainwaves and creativity churning.

Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose is a book on style that I constantly recommend to my students. I’ve read it a couple of times, especially before I went into the revision of Pen on Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide to Igniting the Writer Within.

Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, 3rd Edition and Words Fail Me: What Everyone Who Writes Should Know about Writing contain all those rules of usage you become confused about, like when to use lay/laid/lie/lain or who/whom, and so on.

And of course The Elements of Style Illustrated. I love this edition because it’s illustrated by one of my all-time favorite illustrators, Maira Kalman.

I don’t know which came first, my show or this book, but it’s the one book of essays about writing that I return to time and again. It contains two of my favorite writing essays, one by Walter Mosley and and one by Roxana Robinson. It is Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times.

Speaking of Walter Mosley, he’s known mostly as a crime or mystery novelist, but I love his little book on writing a novel called This Year You Write Your Novel.

You don’t have to be a dancer to appreciate The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life. There’s so much here on creativity that applies to artists in all genres, and I especially like what she has to say about mirrors.

When I was teaching at UC-Irvine Extension, Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within was on my required reading list. The author, Dennis Palumbo, is a therapist as well as a writer, and former screenwriter, and he understands the inner workings of the creative mind, what hangs us up, how shame translates into procrastination or writers’ block, and more.

Making a Literary Life was also on my required reading list. I love Carolyn See’s voice and wisdom and humor about writing.