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:

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

Hardcover edition of “What I Talk About…”

If On Writing was a collection of anecdotes centered around a writer’s life and craft, Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is a travel journal told in the structure of The Hero’s Journey. It would be almost impossible, I believe, for a novelist to write a memoir - even one centered around the need to complete triathlons and ultra-marathons - and not talk about their writing life.

Perhaps best known for his magical realist fiction, Murakami dives deep into why he runs - at one point saying “I run in order to acquire a void” (p. 17) - and how it has helped him write novels. He believes great stamina and endurance is needed to complete a good novel, then start again with another. It’s hard work. He says:

“I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity. To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort.” (p. 43)

While he had pretty immediate success with his first novel, which was hand written and sent into a contest (which he won), Murakami is clear that some people have a natural wellspring of talent, and others have to work hard to get there. One thing that stood out to me about his early career, hidden behind some ridiculous luck and missing information, is that he started to translate things like Raymond Carver into Japanese. This kind of deep focus on a masterwork builds skill and awareness, especially when you are having to think creatively about how to make the meaning work in a different language and culture. Often I hear advice, which basically amounts to: retype your favorite book, just to get the physical feeling of making the words appear. I haven’t tried this myself (mostly because it seems like a lot of time spent not creating new work), but if you’re struggling with structure or sentence construction, I hear it helps!

“I only began to enjoy studying after I got through the educational system and became a so-called member of society. If something interested me, and I could study it at my own pace and approach it the way I liked, I was pretty efficient at acquiring knowledge and skills.” (p. 35)

I never finished college. There are some credits, somewhere, aging on a community college registry. I liked a lot of classes, especially after I stopped following the general degree path and dove into philosophy and sociology classes. But through staying curious and reading, I learn a lot. I try to let myself be interested in many different subjects, mostly creative and writing subjects these days, but I also try to listen. Writing is about following ideas into dark places, learning about things (whether they are emotional things or physical things) you might never have thought about. This is a new realization for me. I’m sure you came to it much sooner than I did, but I never understood the amount of deep thought work that went into writing. Not only is there intentionality in creating fiction, but there’s also a need to get deeply into the whys of the world.

“…the next most important quality [after talent] is for a novelist [to have] focus - the ability to concentrate all your limited talents on whatever’s critical at the moment. Without that you can’t accomplish anything of value… Even a novelist who has a lot of talent and a mind full of great ideas probably can’t write a thing if, for instance, he’s suffering a lot of pain from a cavity.” (p. 77)

The Hero’s Journey of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, surrounds Murakami’s failure to complete a triathlon he’d been training for for a long time. He’s completed marathons and ultra-marathons and even some triathlons, but at some point everyone fails. His road of trials begins when he has to re-learn how to swim (having been self-taught originally) and wait for the next triathlon season to come around. In the end, of course, he finishes the race and is happy with his time - then he competes again, how could he resist? And while this may seem like the kind of memoir you wouldn’t be too interested in if you weren’t a runner, you’d be wrong. It’s interesting and personal, it’s compelling in the same ways his novels are compelling. It’s good writing that no one was really asking for (he says), but that was personal to his experience. In the end, upon re-reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, I came away with a lot of writing advice, but also the idea that even personal travel journals can have good structure.

“…I didn’t start running because somebody asked me to become a runner. Just like I didn’t become a novelist because someone asked me to. One day, out of the blue, I wanted to write a novel. And one day, out of the blue, I started to run - simply because I wanted to. I’ve always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I’m wrong, but I won’t change.” (p. 150)

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”