On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all. I’m not editorializing, just trying to give you the facts as I see them.

‘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.

Men had landed on the moon, and I had landed on the Dean’s List.

We came from different religions, but as a feminist Tabby has never been crazy about the Catholics, where the men make the rules (including the God-given directive to always go in bareback) and the women wash the underwear.

Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

There was also a work-ethic in the poem that I liked, something that suggested writing poems (or stories, or essays) had as much in common with sweeping the floor as with mythy moments of revelation. There’s a place in A Raisin in the Sun where a character cries out: ‘I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!’ to which his wife replies, ‘First eat your eggs.’

My mother knew I wanted to be a writer (with all those rejection slips hanging from the spike on my bedroom wall, how could she not?), but she encouraged me to get a teacher’s credential ‘so you’ll have something to fall back on.’

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.

the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don’t give in to their sensitivities.

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.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.

I’m not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.

Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.

The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful – at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.

The other piece of advice I want to give you before moving on to the next level of the toolbox is this: The adverb is not your friend.

You probably do know what you’re talking about, and can safely energize your prose with active verbs.

Use active verbs

And you probably have told your story well enough to believe that when you use he said, the reader will know how he said it – fast or slowly, happily or sadly. Your man may be floundering in a swamp, and by all means throw him a rope if he is . . . but there’s no need to knock him unconscious with ninety feet of steel cable.

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

Write to tell a story, not to impress with your writing

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

In expository prose, paragraphs can (and should) be neat and utilitarian. The ideal expository graf contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first.

Even in the informal essay, however, it’s possible to see how strong the basic paragraph form can be. Topic-sentence-followed-by-support-and-description insists that the writer organize his/her thoughts, and it also provides good insurance against wandering away from the topic. Wandering isn’t a big deal in an informal essay, it’s practically de rigueur, as a matter of fact – but it’s a very bad habit to get into when working on more serious subjects in a more formal manner. Writing is refined thinking. If your master’s thesis is no more organized than a high school essay titled ‘Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,’ you’re in big trouble.

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.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

Still, I believe the first draft of a book – even a long one – should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

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 – something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) production is working in a serene atmosphere.

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.

Your schedule – in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk – exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

What would be very wrong, I think, is to turn away from what you know and like (or love, the way I loved those old ECs and black-and-white horror flicks) in favor of things you believe will impress your friends, relatives, and writing-circle colleagues.

What’s equally wrong is the deliberate turning toward some genre or type of fiction in order to make money.

the job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies, not to commit intellectual dishonesty in the hunt for the buck. Also,...

Book-buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages. This happens, I think, when readers recognize the people in a book, their behaviors, their surroundings, and their talk.

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.

If you’re a plumber who enjoys science fiction, you might well consider a novel about a plumber aboard a starship or on an alien planet. Sound ludicrous? The late Clifford D. Simak wrote a novel called Cosmic Engineers which is close to just that. And it’s a terrific read.

What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. Th...

In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.

I distrust plot for two reasons: first, because our lives are largely plotless, even when you add in all our reasonable precautions and careful planning; and second, because I believe plotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren’t compatible.

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.

Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players. Nor do I think that physical description should be a shortcut to character. So spare me, if you please, the hero’s sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine’s arrogant cheekbones. This sort of thing is bad technique and lazy writing, the equivalent of all those tiresome adverbs.

It’s also important to remember it’s not about the setting, anyway – it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story.

The use of simile and other figurative language is one of the chief delights of fiction – reading it and writing it, as well.

My all-time favorite similes, by the way, come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include ‘It was darker than a carload of assholes’ (George V. Higgins) and ‘I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief’ (Raymond Chandler).

what people say often conveys their character to others in ways of which they – the speakers – are completely unaware. You can tell me via straight narration that your main character, Mistuh Butts, never did well in school, never even went much to school, but you can convey the same thing, and much more vividly, by his speech . . . and one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead:

As with all other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty. And if you are honest about the words coming out of your characters’ mouth, you’ll find that you’ve let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.

You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart’s War, good story though it is, so sadly lacks – and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer.