Books on writing 101 is a collection of recommendations to get you started on writing. Inspirational, insightful, and entertaining books I’ve enjoyed that will help you find your own way. Everyone learns differently, but this is how I started:

Stephen King’s On Writing

On Writing, like many great writing craft books, is mostly memoir. King is the master of funny and strange stories, and this book is filled with all kinds of anecdotes about a writer’s life, rejection, and what it’s like, on a day-to-day level, to have a job, and a family, while trying to learn how to write.

While discussing how much he writes, King gives the writing habits of the English author Anthony Trollope as an example:

“His day job was as a clerk in the British Postal Department; he wrote for two and a half hours each morning before leaving for work. This schedule was ironclad. If he was in mid-sentence when the two and a half hours expired, he left that sentence unfinished until the next morning. And if he happened to finish one of his six-hundred-page heavyweights with fifteen minutes remaining, he wrote “the end,” set the manuscript aside, and began work on the next book.” (p.147)

Like most beginning writers in their thirties, I have a day job and I work a lot. There isn’t always time for writing (or, more honestly, there isn’t always the mental space that writing needs). I get up at five-thirty and get home around six in the evening. On weekends, I try to fit writing in where I can – mostly in the morning or afternoon, when the ideas are fresh, and the coffee is still working. But since the pandemic hit, I’ve been trying to make time in the evenings. At a particularly busy and stressful period of work, I realized the few hours I was able to get writing done on the weekends weren’t enough. So, I made a plan: most weeknights, after dinner and a little TV, I’d sit down at the kitchen table for at least an hour and try to work on something. It wasn’t always writing, but it was something. When I didn’t feel like I could write, I tried to read or study different craft books.

On reading, King says:

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write – simple as that.” (p. 142)

On Writing is an inspirational and hugely entertaining book, even if you aren’t looking to learn how to become a better writer, which is something I think is very important. So many people have picked this book up and thought, Wow, I think I want to try that, which is the success of any good writing book.

There’s an aside I hear repeated a lot in writing conversations, which comes from a part of On Writing about ideas and subjects – basically: if you’re a plumber who enjoys science fiction, writing about a plumber on a spaceship… etc. But I find what comes right before this quote more enlightening:

“Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work.” (p. 157)

It isn’t always easy to sit down and write about what you know - or come up with new ideas - especially when you’ve spent all day building spreadsheets. Mindless, endless, spreadsheets. But this advice still holds. Instead of work, you could write a cautionary tale about mindlessness or perhaps about an action scene that takes place in the tight cubicle corridor you know so well. (“How would I get off the roof?” you have to ask yourself.) Even in those experimental moments, when you don’t know what to write - keep writing, see if you can make it into something.

“When I’m writing,” King says, “it’s all the playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent there were still pretty damned good.” (p. 149)

Keep your eyes out for more Books on Writing 101 next week! The 101 series are books that I think are a great place to start if you know nothing about writing and want to get started. Nothing too wild, but still packed with wonderful tips and insight.

Also, please let me in the comments what your favorite books on writing are!