Things to Read
Here are some books and magazines that have inspired and shaped us over the years.
Writing
- Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (Roy Peter Clark)
- This Year You Write Your Novel (Walter Mosley)
Filmmaking and Directing
- Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television (Judith Weston)
- Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair (Frank Hauser and Russell Reich)
- Hitchcock/Truffaut (Alfred Hitchcock and François Truffaut)
- Making Movies (Sidney Lumet)
- In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing (Walter Murch)
- On Film-making: An Introduction to the Craft of the Director (Alexander Mackendrick, Paul Cronin and Martin Scorsese)
Drawing
- The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study (Kimon Nicolaïdes)
- And any of the classic old drawing books by Andrew Loomis: Figure Drawing, Drawing the Head and Hands by Loomis and Creative Illustration
Creative Process
- The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Twyla Tharp and Mark Reiter)
We recommended The Creative Habit to Catherine Simon, who does the artwork for our ongoing detective adventureA Person Known to Me, and she was so taken with the book that she created this beautiful study guide for it. (If the PDF doesn't open in your browser, you can download a copy here. - Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Performance (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Music
Assorted Inspiration
- French Cooking in Ten Minutes: Adapting to the Rhythm of Modern Life (1930) (Edouard de Pomaine, Philip Hyman and Mary Hyman)
- The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert Caro)
- Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Matthew B. Crawford)
Web Development
- Head First HTML and CSS (Elisabeth Robson and Eric Freeman)
- Head First HTML5 Programming: Building Web Apps with JavaScript (Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson)