On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

Writing is seduction.

Charles Dickens, the Shakespeare of the novel, has

No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person; give smart people half a chance and they will ship their oars and drift … dozing to Byzantium, you might say.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read.

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath 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

Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing;

(Can You Forgive Her? is a fair enough example; for modern audiences it might be retitled Can You Possibly Finish It?

This schedule was ironclad.

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 work to loud music – hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ’n Roses, and Metallica have always been particular favorites – but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door. It surrounds me, keeps the mundane world out. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all … as long as you tell the truth.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, but they do.

Honesty in story-telling makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work of wooden-prose writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ayn Rand shows, but lying is the great unrepairable fault. Liars prosper, no question about it, but only in the grand sweep of things, never down in the jungles of actual composition, where you must take your objective one bloody word at a time. If you begin to lie about what you know and feel while you’re down there, everything falls down.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot.

Given Katzenbach’s considerable talents in other areas, his failure here tends to reinforce my idea that writing good dialogue is art as well as craft.

Elmore Leonard is capable of a kind of street poetry. The skill necessary to write such dialogue comes from years of practice; the art comes from a creative imagination which is working hard and having fun. As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.

unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader – your promise to express the truth of

dentist. Norris’s books provoked a good deal of public outrage, to which Norris responded coolly and disdainfully: ‘What do I care for their opinions? I never truckled. I told them the truth.’

I almost always start with something that’s situational. I don’t say that’s right, only that it’s the way I’ve always worked. If a story ends up that same way, however, I count it something of a failure no matter how interesting it may be to me or to others. I think the best stories always end up being about people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.

Added to these versions of yourself are the character traits, both lovely and unlovely, which you observe in others (a guy who picks his nose when he thinks no one is looking, for instance). There is also a wonderful third element: pure blue-sky imagination. This is the part which allowed me to be a psychotic nurse for a little while when I was writing Misery. And being Annie was not, by and large, hard at all. In fact, it was sort of fun. I think being Paul was harder. He was sane, I’m sane, no four days at Disneyland there.

practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable.

I don’t believe a story or a novel should be allowed outside the door of your study or writing room unless you feel confident that it’s reasonably reader-friendly. You can’t please all the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time. I think William Shakespeare said that.

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, toss it. Toss it even if you love it. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch once said, ‘Murder your darlings,’ and he was right.

It is that ability to summarize and encapsulate that makes symbolism so interesting, useful, and – when used well – arresting.

Only story is about story. (Are you tired of hearing that yet? I hope not, ’cause I’m not even close to getting tired of saying it.)

So instead of moving on to another project, I started taking long walks (a habit which would, two decades later, get me in a lot of trouble). I took a book or magazine on these walks but rarely opened it, no matter how bored I felt looking at the same old trees and the same old chattering, ill-natured jays and squirrels. Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam. I spent those walks being bored and thinking about my gigantic boondoggle of a manuscript.

If there is any one thing I love about writing more than the rest, it’s that sudden flash of insight when you see how everything connects.

The great thing about writing with the door shut is that you find yourself forced to concentrate on story to the exclusion of practically everything else.

What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader’s mind (and heart) after he or she has closed the book and put it up on the shelf.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.