On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

TV came relatively late to the King household, and I’m glad. 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.

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

Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls’ bathroom. “Someday I’ll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve,” he told me on more than one occasion. “Hack, hack, hack.” Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: “The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there.” This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen koan or an early story by John Updike.

A friend of mine who has been through this tells an amusing story about his first tentative effort to get a grip on his increasingly slippery life. He went to a counsellor and said his wife was worried that he was drinking too much. “How much do you drink?” the counsellor asked. My friend looked at the counsellor with disbelief. “All of it,” he said, as if that should have been self-evident.

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.

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).

That you forgot to resolve some important plot point? Forgot an entire character, as Raymond Chandler once did? (When asked about the murdered chauffeur in The Big Sleep, Chandler—who liked his tipple—replied, “Oh, him. You know, I forgot all about him.”)

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).