On Writing
by Stephen King
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stephen KingEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-07-01
ISBN: 0743455967
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Pocket Books
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Book Reviews of On Writing
Book Review: 56 Commandments on Writing by Stephen King ...
Summary: 5 Stars
1. If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There is no shortcut.
2. Reading is the creative center of a writer's life.
3. The TV is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.
4. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate is four to six hours - every day.
5. Once I start on a project, I don't stop and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to.
6. Strunk and White is to a Writer what the Bible is to a Preacher.
7. Life isn't a support system for art, it's the other way around.
8. The idea that the creative endeavor and mind altering substances are entwined is one of the great myths of our time.
9. You must not come lightly to the blank page.
10. The first draft of a book should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
11. The adverb is not your friend.
12. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero bull from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible.
13. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three month span, a goodish length for a book.
14. Only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before getting 2,000 words.
15. When you write, you want to get rid of the world. It's wise to eliminate every possible distraction.
16. Paragraphs are almost as important for how the look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.
17. The paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.
18. Grammar is not just a pain in the rump; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking.
19. Write about anything you want as long as you tell the truth.
20. You need a room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You'll also need a concrete goal as well.
21. You should anything that improves the quality of your writing and doesn't get in the way of your story.
22. Writing fiction is a lonely job
23. The first draft should be written with no help from anyone.
24. Never let an unfriendly draft cross the threshold of your office or out of your desk drawer.
25. The most common tool of any writer is vocabulary.
26. Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox and don't make any conscious effort to improve it.
27. Do not dress up vocabulary, looking for long words because you're a little ashamed of your short ones.
28. Invest in a copy of Warriner's English Grammar and composition.
29. Don't be a Muggle. Avoid the passive tense!
30. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs
31. Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.
32. The object of writing isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.
33. I can't lie and say that there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.
34. While it is possible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one.
35. The secret of my success is that I stayed physically healthy (well, almost) and I stayed married.
36. You're job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be everyday from Nine `til Noon.
37. Novels consist of three parts: narration, description and dialogue.
38. Plot is a good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice.
39. The situation comes first. The characters come next. Once I have these things fixed in my mind I begin to narrate.
40. Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.
41. With characters, it boils down to two things: paying attention to how real the people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.
42. Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity.
43. Symbolism is a focusing device for both you and your reader, helping to create a more unified and pleasing work.
44. Revising is three drafts, or two drafts and a polish.
45. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.
46. You should put your first draft away for six weeks before starting the second draft, because it's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than your own.
47. When you give out six or eight copies of a book, you'll get back six or eight highly subjective opinions about what's good and what's bad in it.
48. Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds.
49. Your early readers will also gauge whether or not your story is paced correctly and if you've handled the back story correctly.
50. The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) every one has back story and (b) most of it isn't very interesting.
51. Routine interruption and distraction don't much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it some ways. It is the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl.
52. You don't need writing classes and seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing.
53. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the door closed.
54. You should have an agent. If your work is salable then you will have only a moderate amount of trouble finding one. You'll probably be able to find one even if you work isn't salable, as long as it shows promise.
55. The scariest moment is always just before you start.
56. Writing is magic.
******
Summary of On Writing
"Long live the King" hailed "Entertainment Weekly" upon the publication of Stephen King's "On Writing." Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, "On Writing" will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "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." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo
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