On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

We do it for the music, but we also do it for the companionship. We like each other, and we like having a chance to talk sometimes about the real job, the day job people are always telling us not to quit. We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, ‘Not for us.’

The Drum did not prosper under my editorship. Then as now, I tend to go through periods of idleness followed by periods of workaholic frenzy.

As all sophomoric humorists must be, I was totally blown away by my own wit.

When he finished marking my copy in the manner indicated above, he looked up and saw something on my face. I think he must have mistaken it for horror. It wasn’t; it was pure revelation.

but I needed the paycheck. My mother was making lousy wages as a housekeeper at a facility for the mentally ill in New Gloucester,

My mother liked Lyndon’s War on Poverty (‘That’s the war I’m in,’ she sometimes said),

Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were dead, but Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite, Jimi Hendrix, Cass Elliot, John Lennon, and Elvis Presley were still alive and making music.

And while I believe in God I have no use for organized religion.

Ars poetica in 1969 was perhaps best expressed by a Donovan Leitch song that went, ‘First there is a mountain / Then there is no mountain / Then there is.’ Would-be poets were living in a dewy Tolkien-tinged world, catching poems out of the ether.

There were times – especially in summer, while swallowing my afternoon salt-pill – when it occurred to me that I was simply repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I’d think This isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then I’d think Half the world has the same idea.

and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk.

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.

I can’t remember which year, only that it was before I met Tabby but after I started to smoke.

The story remained on the back burner for awhile, simmering away in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious, either.

I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t much like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting ‘Plug it up! Plug it up!’ and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl cast of supporting characters.

For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.

The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that 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. Tabby

In the Durham of my childhood, life wore little or any makeup.

remember the two of us lying in bed that night, eating toast and talking until the small hours of the morning.

telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world’s most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting.

By 1985 I had added drug addiction to my alcohol problem, yet I continued to function, as a good many substance abusers do, on a marginally competent level. I was terrified not to; by then I had no idea of how to live any other life.

I bargained, because that’s what addicts do. I was charming, because that’s what addicts are.

and what finally decided me was Annie Wilkes, the psycho nurse in Misery. Annie was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet writer. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that. It didn’t, of course. The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair.

Best takeway

Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers – common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit.

Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do.

Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.

At the worst of it I no longer wanted to drink and no longer wanted to be sober, either. I felt evicted from life.

At the start of the road back I just tried to believe the people who said that things would get better if I gave them time to do so. And I never stopped writing. Some of the stuff that came out was tentative and flat, but at least it was there. I buried those unhappy, lackluster pages in the bottom drawer of my desk and got on to the next project. Little by little I found the beat again, and after that I found the joy again.

I came back to it the way folks come back to a summer cottage after a long winter, checking first to make sure nothing has been stolen or broken during the cold season. Nothing had been. It was still all there, still all whole. Once the pipes were thawed...

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around. WHAT WRITING IS Telepathy, of course.

All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.

but you’re quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages. Not that you have to be there; books are a uniquely portable magic.

So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place and probably you do, too – a place where the light is good and the vibe is usually strong.

We’re having a meeting of the minds.

Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

and told me to put it back in the toolbox and ‘latch her up.’ I did, but I was puzzled. I asked him why he’d lugged Fazza’s toolbox all the way around the house, if all he’d needed was that one screwdriver. He could have carried a screwdriver in the back pocket of his khakis. ‘Yeah, but Stevie,’ he said, bending to grasp the handles, ‘I didn’t know what else I might find to do once I got out here, did I? It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.’

but there comes a point where a toolbox becomes too large to be portable and thus loses its chief virtue.

The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

The structure is complex; the vocabulary is not far removed from the old Dick and Jane primers. The Grapes of Wrath is, of course, a fine novel. I believe that Blood Meridian is another, although there are great whacks of it that I don’t fully understand. What of that? I can’t decipher the words to many of the popular songs I love, either.

There’s also stuff you’ll never find in the dictionary, but it’s still vocabulary.

The word is only a representation of the meaning;

American grammar doesn’t have the sturdiness of British grammar

Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it’s the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn’t they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.

Don’t be a muggle!

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.

to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

Writing is refined thinking.