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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft By Stephen King ( Scribner )
Release Date: 2000-10-03
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $25.00
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Product Description
"Long live the King," hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported, near-fatal accident in 1999 -- and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it -- fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.
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Amazon.com Review
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing." King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo
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 Another Side of Stephen King ( mrssheehan16 )
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Stephen King says that we must come to writing in almost any way but lightly. We may be angry or exhuberant or jealous or anguished. I repeat, as does he, we must come to the craft any way but lightly. This is a side of Stephen King I have neve seen before, and I like it. The book is a wonderful guide to the art, to the craft of writing. My book is new, but is already earmarked and looks worn with age, as all great books should. All true devotees to the craft of writing, all who know that the demands of writing are great, should own this book. It is a revelation.
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Don't wait for the muse...show up every day
I don't even read Stephen King books. I don't like horror books as I have nightmares - but I know Stephen is a writing legend so this book was fantastic to read.
He writes in that "real person" way that makes you feel he is not some writing super-hero that just creates a bestseller out of nothing. He is to the point in his advice, but behind it is his story. How he and Tammy came from nothing, how his drug use crushed him, and how his accident changed the way he sees the world. He knows the power of story.
Some top pieces of advice from the book:
- Close your door and make a serious commitment to write. Don't wait for the muse to come. Show up every day and "sooner or later, he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic"
- Write what you love to read. Don't write in a genre to make money.
- If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write.
- He writes by finding some characters and then putting them in a situation. They often surprise him by what happens.
- Write your first full draft with no input. Then let it rest for 6 weeks or so "like bread dough between kneadings". You will find it much easier to kill your darlings after a rest
- Revise for length. 2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%
- "Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word "Writer" on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not."
Great book!
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 really good stuff
I'm not even a fan of Stephen King. I've seen plenty
of movies made from his books and most of them were
bad or stupid or both.
I have read a handful of fiction books the guy wrote.
He's easy to read - he hashes out these very human
characters well and puts them in these unusual, frightening
situations - often no-wins. You probably know that.
It's easy to overlook that King, the champion schlockmeister,
is a consumate communicator. His writing is empathic - which
is what keeps us curious and involved in the stories.
Honestly - I don't like slasher movies. Maybe King doesn't
write them but in my little brain he is inextricably tied
to the genre that scared the pants off me as a kid -
Friday the 13th, et. al.
The funny thing is that King's fiction is surprisingly
complex, rich in character and local color. When
put on the screen it is generally dull and seems formulaic -
but that is perhaps more because King's writing has
influenced all scary movies of the last 30 years.
I'm an admirer now. I'm taking writing a lot more seriously
now than I have in the last 15 years. I still think
the themes and plots of many of King's novels don't
interest me - but after reading this there are a half-dozen
or so I may track-down and read.... particularly:
-The Stand
-The Tommyknocker's (apparently derivative of 5 Million Years To Earth - which
is close to the best Sci-fi film ever, IMO, and ripped-off also in the Space
Vampires movie "LifeForce")
Oh yeah. The writing stuff. Cogent. To the point. How
to simplify and amplify the power of your story. He tells
how to defeat the Passive Voice habit, how to recover
from adverb abuse, etc... basically how to get the bad
habits out of the way so the competent writer can progress
towards becoming a good one.
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Impassioned instruction from the King of horror
King's passion for writing is absolute and he imparts his passion to the reader. That alone is a good enough reason to read On Writing, but this book is unexpectedly engaging and informative at every turn.
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On Writing by Stephen King
This work is phenomenal. I was only interested in the craft of writing and had never read Stephen King before. Though the work is supposed to be a manual for better writing, it reads like a thrilling novel. What a surprise.
I never imagined discussions of drafts, agents, editing, grammar, etc. could be woven together with King's biography to produce an astounding, readable text on writing.
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Addiction
