I'm kind of a collector of writer's "How To" books because I started writing convinced that I didn't know much, and 'lo, I was right. I've read good "How-to" books, and bad ones, and since there is so much at play in becoming a great author that no one book has the vigor to discuss it all, and do so well, "Mastery is not something that strikes in an instant, like a thunderbolt, but a gathering power that moves steadily through time, like weather," there are a few books I cozy up to when I need some insight.

Of course, OSC's Characters and Viewpoint is one of the better ones on the market for narrative style. For the building blocks of intriguing prose, I like "Sin and Syntax," by Constance Hale. For remedial grammar, "The Well-Tempered Sentence," by Kathleen Gordon was the best buy for me, and of course, The Elements of Style. And tomorrow I'm going to hunt down a copy of W. W. Watt's An American Rhetoric because I've heard good things.

In two years, the quality of my prose and storytelling has improved ten-fold. I know most cats are too cool to buy into guides, but I'm an evangelist for the good ones, and I think that The Art of Fiction is a good one.

It's one of the first guides which makes me want to stay up to read it and frantically type down notes and passages. The book has even, dare I say it lest it be true, has convinced me that I need to seriously start studying poetry. As it stands, I don't understand poetry. I've never made a serious study of it and all of my half-hearted attempts have landed me in extreme antipathy, but this book makes a compelling case about why it's necessary.

Edit:

This guide is so good that it makes me want to stay up and read it for the rest of the night. *in awe*

I sort of collect books about writing as well. Some of my favorites are The Forest for the Trees by Betsy Lerner, Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing, and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird.

I've read Bird by Bird and Writing Down the Bones, and while I enjoyed both, they weren't helpful at all to me in writing. On the other hand, a friend of mine who just made her first sale to Realms of Fantasy likes them very much.

I've gotten a lot out of Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, which is about why manuscripts get rejected and how to develop the strengths that prevent manuscripts from getting rejected. So while it's from a very practical viewpoint, it gets to some important issues about what makes a good story and how good writing works, specifically. Not that I agree with everything in it, but there are some very useful bits.

A book that I found helpful in similar ways, although it is not a similar book, is Donald Maass' Writing the Breakout Novel. Again, this is a successful agent giving some very useful insights into what makes a strong manuscript.

The books I get the most out of are ones that talk about specific facets of the work of writing: where the pitfalls are, how they can be improved, how a given aspect (description, character development, settings, etc.) can rise above the ordinary.

I enjoyed King's On Writing, although there was some of it that was not helpful to me. It was an enjoyable read as autobiography, too.

Hope some of these suggestions are helpful to others out there, and I hope to find other books through this thread that are helpful to me.

You have this in the preface:

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As a matter of fact, most of the books one finds in drugstores, supermarkets, and even small-town public libraries are not well written at all; a smart chimp with a good creative-writing teacher and a love of sitting around banging a typewriter could have written books vastly more interesting and elegant. Most grown-up behavior, when you come right down to it, is decidedly second-class. People don't drive their cars as well, or wash their ears as well, or eat as well, or even play harmonica as well as they would if they had sense. The is not to say people are terrible and should be replaced by machines; people are excellent and admirable creatures; efficiency isn't everything.
Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.

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And then he lays into the philistines in Chapter 1:

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No ignoramous- no writer who has kept himself innocent of education- has ever produced great art. One trouble with having read nothing worth reading is that one never fully understands the other side of one's argument, never understands that the argument is an old one (all great arguments are), never understands the dignity and worth of the people one has cast as enemies...

Take the Grapes of Wrath. It should have been one of America's great books. But while Steinbeck knew all there was to know about Okies and the countless sorrows of their move to California to find work, he knew nothing about the California ranchers who employed and exploited them; he had no clue to, or interest in, their reasons for behaving as they did; and the result is that Steinbeck wrote not a great and firm novel but a disappointing melodrama in which complex good is pitted against unmitigated, unbelieveable evil...
If one studies the work of the self-educated and we do not mean here the man who starts out with limited by rigorous and classical education, like Herman Melville- what one notices at once is the spottiness and therefore awkwardness of their knowledge. One forgives the fault, but the fact remains that it distracts and makes the work less than it might have been.

One finds, for instance, naively excited and lengthy discussions of ideas that are commonplace or have long been discredited, or one finds curious, quirky interpretations of old myths- interpretations that, though interesting in themselves, suffer by comparison with what the myths really say and mean.

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It's intimidating because he has thought about this so much and has such firm opinons that it forces you to come to grips with his argument. That and his prose is so clear and lively, one cannot pretend that one did not understand what he means. There aren't too many interpretations of, "No ignoramous- no writer who has kept himself innocent of education- has ever produced great art."

His intellectual honesty is also off putting because he never confuses the difference between what he knows and what he doesn't. He takes himself seriously, and his lack of humility or superfluous rhetoric is eerie. You can't discount him as a snob because he advocates for Spiderman, Howard the Duck, Stevie Wonder and the Beatles. In every way he writes as if he knows what the hell he is talking about, and with every sentence you are damned to a clearer understanding of the Art of writing and reading fiction.

It's better than both OSC's books combined, and I feel like the last year and a half of my life were horribly inefficient because I did not read this book before. It is to fiction what Shrunk and White's book is to composition.