On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

by Stephen King

The Elements of Style.

Then as now, I tend to go through periods of idleness followed by periods of workaholic frenzy.

It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

“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.”

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.

you’re quite likely in your own far-seeing place, the one where you go to receive telepathic messages.

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

Remember that 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’ll also want grammar on the top shelf of your toolbox,

The Elements of Style:

Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write The meeting’s at seven. There, by God! Don’t you feel better?

road to hell is paved with adverbs,

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

Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.

It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.

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

quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good

What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff?

when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head.

every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty.

four to six hours a day, eve...

If you feel you need permission to do all the reading and writing your little heart desires, however, consider it hereby granted by yours truly.

If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?

I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story.

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. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety—those are jobs which require the noisy jackhammer of plot—but to watch what happens and then write it down.

I am going to show you the location of a fossil. Your job is to write five or six pages of unplotted narration concerning this fossil. Put another way, I want you to dig for the bones and see what they look like. I think you may be quite surprised and delighted with the results. Ready? Here we go.

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

The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.

These ideas called for a dangerously unstable politician, it seemed to me—a fellow who could climb the political ladder by showing the world a jolly, jes’-folks face and charming the voters by refusing to play the game in the usual way.

Bausch, Richard: In the Night Season

Bryson, Bill: A Walk in the Woods

Faulkner, William: As I Lay Dying

Golding, William: Lord of the Flies

O’Brien, Tim: In the Lake of the Woods

Tyler, Anne: A Patchwork Planet