Sundays with Stephen King’s “On Writing”

A series featuring reflections on writing from the famed writer’s memoir.

I had not read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing for several years when it occurred to me to do so again. While at it, why not share reflections from the renowned writer in a weekly Sunday series at Go Into The Story?

King is a prolific author. Fair to say that is an understatement. One need only glance at a roster of his written works to determine that. If any contemporary writer has earned the right to reflect on the craft, it would be King. However, that is not the motivation he had in writing his memoir. This excerpt from the ‘First Foreword’ of On Writing explains the genesis of the book, a fateful exchange with Amy Tan, fellow writer and member of an authors’ charity rock music group The Remainders.

One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every writer’s talk — that question you never get to answer when you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully, and miss said: “No one ever asks about the language.”

I owe an immediate debt of gratitude to her for saying that. I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held back because I didn’t trust my own motivations — why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one like this, that would leave me feeling like a literary gasbag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those books — and those writers — on the market already, thanks.

But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

My intention in the series was similar to the Sundays with Ray Bradbury series: Each week as I re-read King’s memoir, I printed notable excerpts at Go Into The Story to inspire our creativity and conversation about the craft.

Here are links to the individual weekly Sunday articles:

1. This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.
2. I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened.
3. The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.
4. When I was five or six, I asked my mother if she had ever seen anyone die. Yes, she said, she had seen one person die and had heard another one.
5. “Write one of your own, Stevie,” she said. “I bet you could do better. Write one of your own.”
6. “There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Best Sellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky.”
7. “By the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it.”
8. “At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.”
9. “If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.”
10. “Gould said something else that was interesting on the day I turned in my first two pieces: write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
11. “‘The rats down in the basement were big as cats,’ he said. ‘Some of them, goddam if they weren’t as big as dogs.’”
12. “Her poem also made me feel that I wasn’t alone in my belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven.”
13. “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
14. “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.”
15. “Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was telling me I’d just won the lottery.”
16. “For six years I sat behind the desk either drunk or wrecked out of my mind, like a ship’s captain in charge of a voyage to nowhere.”
17. “All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.”
18. “Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.”
19. “Remember the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”
20. “One who does grasp the rudiments of grammar finds a comforting simplicity at its heart, where there need be only nouns, the words that name, and verbs, the words that act.”
21. “You should avoid the passive tense.”
22. “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”
23. “I am convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”
24. “I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.”
25. “We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style … but as we move along, you’d do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.”
26. “While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.”
27. “There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over.”
28. “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.”
29. “The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”
30. “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.”
31. “The space can be humble… and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut.”
32. “If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.”
33. “I want to put a group of characters in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.”
34. “Description begins in the writers imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
35. “As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.”
36. “I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.”
37. “Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, toss it.”
38. “Once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions.”
39. “Most of all, I am looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning.”
40. “The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing — literary Viagra.”
41. “Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first.”
42. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
43. “The fact is that agents, publishers, and editors are all looking for the next hot writer who can sell a lot of books and make lots of money.”
44. “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”
45. “I try to remember that we’re all amateurs at this, and every time I sit down it’s like the first time.”

This is one of the most popular books on writing and I’m excited to share it with Go Into The Story readers. Let’s see what we can learn in our collective reading of On Writing.

Stephen King’s website

Twitter: @StephenKing

On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft by Stephen King