On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

If you substitute ‘Oh sugar!’ for ‘Oh shit!’ because you’re thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader – your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.

It’s also important to remember that no one is ‘the bad guy’ or ‘the best friend’ or ‘the whore with a heart of gold’ in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby. If you can bring this attitude into your fiction, you may not find it easier to create brilliant characters, but it will be harder for you to create the sort of one-dimensional dopes that populate so much pop fiction.

We’ve covered some basic aspects of good storytelling, all of which return to the same core ideas: that practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs).

Symbolism (and the other adornments, too) does serve a useful purpose, though – it’s more than just chrome on the grille. It can serve as a focusing device for both you and your reader, helping to create a more unified and pleasing work. I think that, when you read your manuscript over (and when you talk it over), you’ll see if symbolism, or the potential for it, exists. If it doesn’t, leave well enough alone. If it does, however – if it’s clearly a part of the fossil you’re working to unearth – go for it. Enhance it. You’re a monkey if you don’t.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

You undoubtedly have your own thoughts, interests, and concerns, and they have arisen, as mine have, from your experiences and adventures as a human being. Some are likely similar to those I’ve mentioned above and some are likely very different, but you have them, and you should use them in your work. That’s not all those ideas are there for, perhaps, but surely it’s one of the things they are good for.

I should close this little sermonette with a word of warning – starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him).

If you’re a beginner, though, let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.

There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in.

This first draft – the All-Story Draft – should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you’re doing to a close friend (very often the close friend you think of first is the one who shares your bed), either because you’re proud of what you’re doing or because you’re doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don’t lower it by exposing what you’ve written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be. There’ll be time to show off what you’ve done when you finish . . . but even after finishing I think you must be cautious and give yourself a chance to think while the story is still like a field of freshly fallen snow, absent of any tracks save your own.

Here’s something else – if no one says to you, ‘Oh Sam (or Amy)! This is wonderful!,’ you are a lot less apt to slack off or to start concentrating on the wrong thing . . . being wonderful, for instance, instead of telling the goddam story.

If you have someone who has been impatiently waiting to read your novel – a spouse, let’s say, someone who has perhaps been working nine to five and helping to pay the bills while you chase your dream – then this is the time to give up the goods . . . if, that is, your first reader or readers will promise not to talk to you about the book until you are ready to talk to them about it.

You can safely relax and leave things the way they are (in baseball, tie goes to the runner; for novelists, it goes to the writer). If some people love your ending and others hate it, same deal – it’s a wash, and tie goes to the writer.

Not that there’s anything wrong with rapidly paced novels. Some pretty good writers – Nelson DeMille, Wilbur Smith, and Sue Grafton, to name just three – have made millions writing them. But you can overdo the speed thing. Move too fast and you risk leaving the reader behind, either by confusing or by wearing him/her out. And for myself, I like a slower pace and a bigger, higher build.

The best way to find the happy medium? Ideal Reader, of course. Try to imagine whether he or she will be bored by a certain scene –

Also, needy or not, you might want to watch and see when your IR puts your manuscript down to do something else. What scene was he or she reading? What was so easy to put down?

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).

Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.’

Usually it is possible. What the Formula taught me is that every story and novel is collapsible to some degree. If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing – literary Viagra. You’ll feel it and your IR will, too.

‘Hi, Doris,’ Tom said. His voice sounded natural enough – to his own ears, at least – but the fingers of his right hand crept to the place where his wedding ring had been until six months ago.

Your Ideal Reader can be of tremendous help when it comes to figuring out how well you did with the back story and how much you should add or subtract on your next draft. You need to listen very carefully to the things IR didn’t understand, and then ask yourself if you understand them. If you do and just didn’t put those parts across, your job on the second draft is to clarify. If you don’t – if the parts of the back story your Ideal Reader queried are hazy to you, as well – then you need to think a lot more carefully about the past events that cast a light on your characters’ present behavior. You also need to pay close attention to those things in the back story that bored your Ideal Reader.

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

When you step away from the ‘write what you know’ rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first. I think that even James Michener and Arthur Hailey would have agreed with that.

Too many writing classes make Wait a minute, explain what you meant by that a kind of bylaw.

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 study door closed.

Writer’s Market,

He also keeps track of magazines where he has established some sort of personal contact, even if that contact consists of nothing but two scribbled lines and a coffee-stain.

You should be especially wary of agents who promise to read your work for a fee.

I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever. There have been times when for me the act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. The second half of this book was written in that spirit. I gutted it out, as we used to say when we were kids.

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. Some of this book – perhaps too much – has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it – and perhaps the best of it – is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

‘Omit needless words’ – and also to satisfy the formula stated earlier: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.