Books on writing 101 is a collection of book 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:

Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

Originally released in 1998, Steering the Craft is a workshop in book form. Filled to the brim with amazing exploratory writing exercises, examples, and tips, this book will get you unstuck from almost any problem you’ll have when starting to write narrative for the first time.

“The exercises are consciousness-raisers: their aim is to clarify and intensify your awareness of certain elements of prose writing.” (p. xii)

In the first chapter, The Sound of Your Writing, Le Guin compels her audience to be gorgeous, just for the pleasure of it. She says:

“Being Gorgeous is a highly repeatable exercise… and can serve as a warm-up to writing. Try to set a mood by using verbal sound effects. Look at the view out the window or the mess on the desk, or remember something that happened yesterday or something weird that somebody said, and make a gorgeous sentence or two or three out of it. It might get you into the swing.” (p. 10)

While this advice might seem simple for some writers, it sets the book outside of most writing craft books pretty early. Ask any author when they were last given permission to just be playful with their writing in school, or at a workshop, and I would be willing to bet you’ll get a series of blank looks. So much of learning the craft of writing is intense focus and technical structure - over and over again it amounts to the feeling of never having read, or tried hard, enough. So to be given permission to just play and be gorgeous is something special.

To give a related example: Chapter 4 is on repetition:

“…to make a rule never to use the same word twice in one paragraph, or to state flatly that repetition is to be avoided, is to go against the nature of narrative prose.” (p. 37)

Le Guin speaks plainly about the flaws in a piece of writing that uses repetition in a way that makes the text distracting, but is careful to say it is also a way to develop voice and wonderful prose. In the end, like all things, it comes down to practice and learning from examples (of which she gives: “The Thunder Badger” from W. L. Marsden’s Northern Paiute Language of Oregon, and “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens).

The exercise for this chapter, to give you an example, is:

“Write a paragraph of narrative (150 words) that includes at least 3 repetitions of a noun, verb, or adjective (a noticeable word, not an invisible one like was, said, did.)” (p. 41)
“…In critiquing, you might concentrate on the effectiveness of the repetitions and their obviousness or subtlety.” (p.42)

When I purchased this book, I have to admit, I was not ready for it. It took me a few years to truly understand the pleasure of these exercises and examples. At the time, I was full of ego and drive, but not ready to learn the things I wasn’t immediately interested in (like how to use POV, or what she calls “crowding and leaping,” which is a way to edit and compress structure during revisions). It wasn’t until I decided to re-read it for this series that I was truly open to what Ursula, wisely, was trying to say.

So if you are leading a workshop, or stuck in a spiral of blocked writing (hoping to get out), I would definitely encourage you to pick up Steering the Craft.

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.

Previous post in this series:

Stephen King’s “On Writing”

Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running”