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:

Derrick Jensen’s Walking on Water

If Steering the Craft is a workshop in a book, Walking on Water is a reflection on having taught. Derrick Jensen is a rather radical (and sometimes brash) person/teacher/writer, so to say take this book with a grain of salt will be, for some, an understatement. It will not be for everyone. But sometimes these are the kinds of books you learn from the most.

I read Derrick Jensen’s The Culture of Make Believe, and then Walking on Water, at a time in my life when I desperately needed something to change. I was looking for activism, I was looking to have my mind blown, and above all I was looking for some goddamn answers. There are a lot of areas in life that seem like endless voids of that’s just the way it is. School, for a long time, felt this way. In Hawaii, where I finished middle school and about half of high school, education felt needlessly stale (hopeless, to put it nicely). Due to generations of defunding and devaluing education, not to mention extremely fresh colonialism, the schools fell into a pattern of group learning and the very basics of education. There wasn’t time to individualize. There wasn’t space to ensure that every child got at least the minimum of what they needed to believe there was a purpose to education. A lot of my friends left school before their junior year, to get a GED, to attend “online school,” to start working, which is no surprise when I think back to the many hours spent in special school counseling sessions, art classes rooms, and hiding behind the tennis court to smoke cigarettes. Maybe this isn’t unique, but it was certainly very discouraging.

“We hear, more or less constantly, that schools are failing in their mandate. Nothing could be more wrong. Schools are succeeding all too well, accomplishing precisely their purpose… the truth is that our society values money above all else, in part because it represents power, and in part because, as is also true of power, it gives the illusion that we can get what we want. But one of the costs of following money is that in order to acquire it, we so often have to give ourselves away to whomever has money to give in return. Bosses, corporations, men with nice cars, women in power suits. Teachers. Not that teachers have money, but in the classroom they have what money elsewhere represents: power.” (p. 5-6)

I see you rolling your eyes, Yes, it is that kind of book. And if you’re 30-something, hopefully you’ve come to this conclusion already. But I first read this when I was 22 years old and on the cusp of losing my mind with work and life. Community College was an extension of high school and money came from working longer hours more often. Quitting college to become an assistant manager at Hot Topic at the mall, to get my own place, to live away from school and parents and start “life.” These are the kinds of books that can take you in one of two paths: radicalized, learned, curious or nihilistic and helpless. In a way I hope you’ve experienced both. I am a deeply cynical person. In my mind, before anything else, there is the negative and a book like this encourages that sometimes. But it also is enlightening and provides the framework for answering things about yourself. What happened to you. These lessons come much later, of course, if at all.

I think writing is about exploring that even deeper. In Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, she says to start with the earliest memory you have and try to write from there - to explore your early life, to explore yourself. It forces you to think deeply about painful things, and happy things, and weird things that happened to you, so you can use those experiences to develop a character. A living thing outside of yourself to which other people can relate.

“My main problem was that my storytelling was false. I didn’t yet understand that in order to write something good, or to tell a good story, I didn’t have to invent something fantastic. I simply had to be as much of myself as possible.” (p. 27)

Whether you are a writer, a teacher, or someone just starting to think about being creative. I recommend reading Walking on Water, if only to start to understand how to see teaching and learning differently. You may know all this already, it might be late enough in your life and learning that this is all galaxy-brain-meme-worthy text. But just in case it isn’t, check this book out from your library. Read it with some awareness of the author, but read it nonetheless.

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”

Ursula K. le Guin’s “Steering the Craft”

Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”