Kana/kanji writing practice book recommendation please?

I think it’s quite rare to find tutorials involving pencils because most people need to write with a pen or a brush, and pen calligraphy videos (at least, in English and Japanese) are rarer than brush calligraphy videos. As far as books go, I strongly doubt that you’ll find anything in English. I could be wrong though, so try looking around. This book that I recommended on the topic that you started should do the trick:

It’s in Japanese, however, so I know that might mean it’s not immediately helpful or useful. Even so, just reading all the ‘sound effect’ katakana and following the arrows and shapes included in the book should teach you quite a lot.

That aside, I think you should take a look at the images I shared in this post on your previous topic:

In order to adapt the ‘brush tip’ images to pen/pencil writing, imagine the brush tip size changes as pressure changes and possibly pen-to-paper angle changes: less pressure and more vertical pen/pencil hold for thinner lines, and more pressure and (sometimes) a smaller pen-to-paper angle for thicker strokes. In order to create tapering, reduce pressure as you draw lines. For sharp hooks/points at the ends of strokes, flicking your pen is an effective approach. (By the way, when I first attempted to ‘write well’ using a pen, my approach was generally to attempt to replicate brushstroke techniques with the pen nib. It worked pretty well – and I reasoned exactly as I just described, in terms of pressure and angle – so I don’t think you should dismiss brush calligraphy tutorials as useless outright.)

I also seriously recommend that you experiment with following the directional arrows in the diagrams I added to that post. Grab a pen or fairly soft pencil and try moving the writing instrument in accordance with those directional lines while attempting to stay within the confines of a stroke (i.e. don’t leave visible white space inside the loops that appear inside one stroke on the diagram). You should start seeing familiar brushstroke-like contours appearing. These are things you’ll really understand only after trying them yourself or after seeing them being done in front of you. Without practical experience, you won’t understand how the movements described can create the shapes you’re looking for.

Finally, again, please refer to the diagrams I added to that post, particularly the ones filled with examples of ‘basic strokes’. All you really need to master in order to get started is the techniques for making such basic strokes, meaning that those are the movements you need to learn first. From there on, you’ll just have to learn to vary the angles and to have a sense of ‘aesthetically pleasing proportions’ for kanji. The closest thing I can find to a tutorial is examples on Takumi-san’s channel. If you find that you need explanation and that trying to imitate what you see is too hard, then I suggest looking out for videos that contain English subtitles on his channel. There aren’t many of them, but the few that there are are quite instructive. Take a look at these two, for instance:

The second probably won’t be that helpful for you at this point, because it deals with more general issues of proportion and how to nicely arrange characters on a page. The first, however, deals with how to write hiragana. You’ll notice that some of these shapes reappear in kanji (I’m not talking about entire kana, but rather certain angles and types of tapering), meaning that you can reapply what you learn from that video when writing kanji.

The last thing I’d like to recommend is not to overthink this: experiment and try to see, ideally by imitating videos, what seems to reproduce what you see in models that you’d like to match. If all the fancy directional lines and ‘movement within a stroke’ diagrams don’t work for you, then take a look at how someone like Takumi-san writes kanji. First, take note of the correct direction for forming the stroke. That’s the most basic step. Thereafter, ask yourself what seems likely to create such a shape. If you see a slight bend right at the beginning of the stroke (e.g. what you often see at the top of 丿), well… maybe there really is a bend! Try going diagonally downwards from left to right at say, 45º to the vertical, and then draw your writing instrument vertically downwards. Does your stroke look like the model? Yes? Good. Not quite? Then what’s different? Most likely, your initial bent stub is a little too long. What happens if you shorten it? Do you see the model appearing now? It’s really very intuitive. Your pen nib is a sphere, but depending on how you angle the pen, how you drag it around and how much pressure you apply, the shape of the marks you make changes. I sincerely believe it’s possible to figure this out by watching videos and imitating them. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Calligraphy in English is the same: you need to be able to produce appropriate variations in line thickness and angle. The only difference is that the characters are less complex.

Use Takumi-san’s pencil hiragana video (the first one) with the subtitles on as a base for learning the right techniques. (Bonus: something that you can learn by watching but which he doesn’t explain: pay close attention to how he starts strokes. He move the pencil a little and stops briefly before changing direction and continuing. That’s how you get nice little ‘starting stubs’. For a particularly good example, watch how he writes と.) I’m pretty sure things will start falling into place afterwards.