📚 Creative Writing

Books with creative writing on their catalogue record, first published between 1938 and 2019, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject creative writing in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 6,609 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Allyn & Bacon guide to writing	John D. Ramage	1996	51
	The Artist's Way	Julia Cameron	1992	31
	How to write a play	Lajos Egri	1942	28
	A short guide to writing about literature	Sylvan Barnet	1968	24
	Alternative scriptwriting	Ken Dancyger	1991	17
	Practical guide to writing	Sylvan Barnet	1975	16
	The Anthropocene Reviewed	John Green	2019	16
	Teaching Writing	Gail E. Tompkins	1990	15
	Statics and strength of materials	H. W. Morrow	1981	14
	The writing process	John M. Lannon	1983	14
	Write Source	Dave Kemper	1995	14
	Imaginative writing	Janet Burroway	2002	14
	Write it	Linda Strahan	2005	11
	Writing Down the Bones	Natalie Goldberg	1986	10
	Poison penmanship	Jessica Mitford	1979	8
	Steal like an artist	Austin Kleon	2012	7
	Creative Writing	David Starkey	2012	7
	If You Want to Write	Brenda Ueland	1938	6
	Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction	Jeff VanderMeer	2013	5
	Writing for television	Max Wylie	1970	4
	Creative writing	Julia Casterton	1986	4
	Sin and syntax	Constance Hale	1999	4
	Poetry for dummies	John Timpane	2001	4
	Creative Writing Exercises For Dummies	Maggie Hamand	2014	4
	The Practice of Creative Writing	Heather Sellers	2016	4
	Creative writing	Dianne Doubtfire	1983	3
	Anybody can write	Roberta Jean Bryant	1985	3
	The college handbook of creative writing	Robert DeMaria	1991	3
	A writer's notebook	Ralph J. Fletcher	1996	3
	On creative writing	Paul Engle	1964	2

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

Nearby shelves

CreativityCreedsCrime and CriminalsCrime PreventionCriminal InvestigationCriminal Law

Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.