About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
by Samuel R. Delany · Wesleyan University Press
Seven essays, four letters and five interviews on what Delany calls the mechanics of fiction, plus thirteen appended mini-workshops on grammar, dramatic structure and point of view. Demanding, sentence-level and skeptical of formula. Wesleyan University Press, 432 pages.
This link may earn us a small commission at no extra cost to you. Affiliate disclosure
More resources on Fantasy & Science Fiction Writing
The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy
Twenty-four essays on why fantasy and science fiction reward serious reading, on myth and archetype, on genre prejudice, and on the making of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness. Scribner 2024 edition, introduced by Ken Liu.
Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story
Ten short chapters on the mechanics of narrative prose - sentence sound, punctuation, verb tense, person and point of view, crowding and leaping - each with examples from published fiction and an exercise. Revised 2015 edition, 160 pages.
Wonderbook (Revised and Expanded): The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
Illustrated genre-craft manual covering inspiration, beginnings and endings, narrative design, characterization and revision, with diagrams, annotated manuscript pages and exercises. The revised edition adds fifty pages; sidebars and essays come from working writers including George R. R. Martin.
Turkey City Lexicon: A Primer for SF Workshops
The shared critique vocabulary of professional science fiction workshops, compiled by Lewis Shiner and Bruce Sterling. Names and defines recurring failure modes - infodump, idiot plot, plot coupons, eyeball kick, hand waving - across prose, story structure, background and viewpoint. Short, free, and the highest-density genre-craft document that exists: it is the diagnostic language SFF professionals use on each other's manuscripts, so it converts vague 'this isn't working' into named, fixable defects.
Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture Series (2025, BYU 318R)
Sixteen filmed sessions of Brandon Sanderson's BYU English 318R course on writing science fiction and fantasy, covering plot, character, magic systems, short fiction, revision and the publishing business, with guest lecturers from inside the industry. The most-cited free SFF craft course in existence. It is an actual accredited university semester, not a content channel: 16 hour-long sessions on plot, character, worldbuilding, short fiction, revision and the business, plus guest lectures from agents and indie publishers. It anchors the entire topic and makes several paid 'learn to write fantasy' products redundant.