On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened.

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers;

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

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.

write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car (always unabridged; I think abridged audiobooks are the pits), and carry another wherever I go.

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

the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.

You should avoid the passive tense.

The adverb is not your friend.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs,

I would argue that the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing—the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words.

I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well—settle

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

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

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 want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free.

The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question:

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

one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead:

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.

the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event,

You must begin as your own advocate, which means reading the magazines publishing the kind of stuff you write. You should also pick up the writers’ journals and buy a copy of Writer’s Market, the most valuable of tools for the writer new to the marketplace.

The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

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.

cut with Strunk in mind—“Omit needless words”—and also to satisfy the formula stated earlier: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.