Jennifer Lane's Reviews > On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Sharing Love for His Craft

I'm embarrassed to admit I've never read a Stephen King novel (maybe because I'm not a horror or paranormal fan, though I adored the movie, The Shawshank Redemption). But I've heard so many recommendations about this book from writers that I wanted to give it a try.

Good writing is a meeting of the minds between the writer and the reader. My favorite advice was about editing. Young Stephen learned volumes from a brief interaction with a local sports reporter:

"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."

Trying to shorten the manuscript by 10% during the editing process sounds about right.

Stephen encourages vivid descriptions without stilted vocabulary, like his characterization of a girl from his school who inspired Carrie:

She wasn't fat, but her flesh had a loose, pale look, like the undersides of some mushrooms.

Upon reflection, Stephen identified the following themes in his writing: how difficult it is to close Pandora's box once it's open; the question of why, if there is a God, such terrible things happen (that interests me as well); the thin line between reality and fantasy; and the terrible attraction violence sometimes has for fundamentally good people.

I busted out laughing at the pretense of his undergraduate writing class:

One young woman wrote a good deal about the moon and her menstrual cycle; in these poems the moon always appeared as the m'n . She could not explain why this had to be, but we all kind of felt it: the m'n, yeah, dig it, sister.

I'm glad I got around to reading this memoir!