/lit/ - Literature

>What do you think is essential reading for those who aspire to be a writer?
Certainly not memeshit like Story genius. List of books that aren't total shit to follow (with reddit spacing for readability):

For General Writing
>The Art of Fiction, Gardner
>The Anatomy of Story, Truby
>On Becoming A Novelist
>Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft (3rd Edition)
>How Fiction Works
>The Rhetoric of Fiction
>Steering the Craft
>On Writing, Borges
A lot of these are somewhat redundant. Anyone who reads around 3 will not need to read the rest. Would be best to filter them down to the top 3-5.

For Poetry (to be fair I don't write poetry so someone probably has better opinions than me)
>The Poetry Home Repair Manual
>Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry
>This Craft of Verse, Borges

For learning how not to shit the bed
>What Editors Do
>Garner's Modern English Usage

Books analyzing literature
>The Weekend Novelist
>Aristotle's Poetics
>Hero With a Thousand Faces
There are a billion more of these but these ones are decent.

Keep the sections on manuscript publishing, but also include a section on what sites can be self published to with a short description of each and what content does best on them. Ex:
>https://www.royalroad.com/ For LitRPG/Fantasy/Light Webfiction
> https://www.wattpad.com/ For Romance and other female-centric genres
etc.
Also I'm not the guy who complained but really, what the fuck were some of those books doing in the OP? The gap in general quality was astounding.