CityReads│Writing Lessons from Stephen King
In his memoir, "On Writing," Stephen King shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer.
King,S. 2000. On Writing: A memoir of the craft. New York: Scribner.
In his memoir, "On Writing," Stephen King shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer.
ⅠRead a lot and Write a Lot
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.
Books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car, and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you’ll want an escape hatch.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones. One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose.
Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.
Great works may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—“I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand”—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.
Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows.
The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
ⅡBuild Your Own Writing Toolbox
To write to your best abilities, construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you.
The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary. Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. You’ll be doing that as you read. One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. The basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.
You’ll also want grammar on the top shelf of your toolbox. Bad grammar produces bad sentences. Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules.
You should avoid the passive tense. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous, as well. I think timid writers like them for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners. Unsure writers also feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority.
The adverb is not your friend. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.
Lift out the top layer of your toolbox—your vocabulary and all the grammar stuff. On the layer beneath go those elements of style. Strunk and White offer the best tools (and the best rules) you could hope for, describing them simply and clearly.
Good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments.
ⅢDon’t Stop Just Because It’s Hard
Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.
(In 1999, Stephen King was hit by a truck and seriously injured when he was writing this book. He started to write again five weeks after the accident even if he had not recovered.)
That first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Smith’s van. When it was over, I was dripping with sweat and almost too exhausted to sit up straight in my wheelchair. The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.
There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after a while, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I started to get on top of them. There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz—not that day—but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life. Writing did not save my life, but it makes my life a brighter and more pleasant place.
ⅣWrite With The Door Closed; Rewrite With The Door Open
I learned this lesson from John Gould when I was in high school. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.
Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.
Then how do you revise your first draft? I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”
ⅤWriting Routine of Stephen King
My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.
Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.
And when I’m not working, I’m not working at all, although during those periods of full stop I usually feel at loose ends with myself and have trouble sleeping. For me, not working is the real work. When I’m writing, it’s all the playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent there were still pretty damned good.
I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.
ⅥSuggestions to the Beginning Writer
You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing, most of us do our best in a place of our own.
The space can be humble and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met.
For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction.
Writing is like creative sleep. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night, so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.
The longer you keep to these basics, the easier the act of writing will become. Don’t wait for the muse. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven’til three.
Now let’s talk about revising the work—how much and how many drafts? For me the answer has always been two drafts and a polish (with the advent of wordprocessing technology, my polishes have become closer to a third draft).
Good presentation, absolutely. When you send your story out, there ought to be a very brief cover-letter on top of the script, telling the editor where you’ve published other stories and just a line or two on what this one’s about. And you should close by thanking him for the reading.
You don’t get any kind of hearing at all unless you go in looking like a professional. You can’t make them like your story, but you can at least make it easy for them to try to like it.
The hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it. The scariest moment is always just before you start. Once you start, it is not so hard.