On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

‘This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit.’

I don’t understand why people need stories, or why I – among many others – feel the need to write them. Do I care? I do not.

I suggested that new writers try for a thousand words a day.

We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do – not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I

Imitation preceded creation;

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.

When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

‘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.’

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. 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.

The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.