on writing by stephen king

Author: scribner

• This is not an autobiography. It is, rather, a kind of curriculum vitae—my attempt to show how one writer was formed.

• Not how one writer was made; I don’t

• I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will (although I did believe those things once). The equipment comes with the original package.

• The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.

• One of them, perhaps pissed off at being relocated, flew out and stung me on the ear. The pain was brilliant, like a poisonous inspiration.

• The ear doctor once again produced the smell of alcohol—a smell I still associate, as I suppose many people do, with pain and sickness and terror—and with it, the long needle.

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

• I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write.

• 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.

• “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.”

• And while I believe in God I have no use for organized religion.

• I fell in love with her partly because I understood what she was doing with her work. I fell because she understood what she was doing with it.

• Writers were blessed stenographers taking divine dictation.

• If pressed, he or she might have said that there were no mechanics, only that seminal spurt of feeling: first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.

• There’s a place in A Raisin in the Sun where a character cries out: “I want to fly! I want to touch the sun!” to which his wife replies, “First eat your eggs.”

• She smiled at me. I smiled back. Sometimes these things are not accidents. I’m almost sure of

• She smiled at me. I smiled back. Sometimes these things are not accidents. I’m almost sure of it.

• I think we had a lot of happiness in those days, but we were scared a lot, too.

• If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book—what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time?

• Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.

• The story remained on the back burner for awhile, simmering away in that place that’s not quite the conscious but not quite the subconscious, either.

• things I learned from Carrie White. The

• But none of them taught me the things I learned from Carrie White. The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters

• In the Durham of my childhood, life wore little or any makeup.

• “What can we do?” I asked. Behind the question was all we knew of our mother, who “kept herself to herself,” as she liked to say. The result of that philosophy was a vast gray space where other families have histories;

• This memory is more like a scene from a TV show than a real memory. I seem to be outside of myself, watching the whole thing.

• Once is enough, just to find out what it’s like. Only an idiot would make a second experiment, and only a lunatic—a masochistic lunatic—would make booze a regular part of his life.

• Alcoholics build defenses like the Dutch build dikes. I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I “just liked to drink.”

• telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world’s most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting.

• I found the idea of social drinking ludicrous—if you didn’t want to get drunk, why not just have a Coke?

• stuff. I responded with self-righteous hauteur

• The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

• Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit.

• 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.

• books are a uniquely portable magic.

• bed—reading in bed can be heaven, assuming you can get just the right amount of light

• As the whore said to the bashful sailor, “It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it.”

• One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.

• use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.

• dislikes—I believe that anyone using the phrase “That’s so cool” should have to stand in the corner and that those using the far more odious phrases “at this point in

• I have my own dislikes—I believe that anyone using the phrase “That’s so cool” should have to stand in the corner

• those using the far more odious phrases “at this point in time” and “at the end of the day” should be sent to bed without supper (or writing-paper, for that matter).

• The adverb is not your friend.

• I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

• All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.

• Writing is refined thinking. If your master’s thesis is no more organized than a high school essay titled “Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,” you’re in big trouble.

• Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at

• Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

• 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.

• Words have weight. Ask anyone who works in the shipping department of a book company warehouse, or in the storage room of a large bookstore.

• am approaching the heart of this

• I am approaching the heart of this book with two theses, both simple. The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

• if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one, or even a competent one. If you’re good and want to be great … fuhgeddaboudit.

• Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

• Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing.

• If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good.

• Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; 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.

• The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s papers and identification pretty much in order.

• The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

• almost, but when it comes to writing, library

• Book-buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.

• Wallace invented— and patented—a device called the Edgar Wallace Plot Wheel. When you got stuck for the next Plot Development or needed an Amazing Turn of Events in a hurry, you simply spun the Plot Wheel and read what came up in the window: a fortuitous arrival, perhaps, or Heroine declares her love.

• Please remember, however, that there is a huge difference between story and plot. Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

• If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition.

• It’s also important to remember it’s not about the setting, anyway—it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story.

• In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it “got boring,” the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.

• By comparing two seemingly unrelated objects—a restaurant bar and a cave, a mirror and a mirage—we are sometimes able to see an old thing in a new and vivid way.

• well, I’m in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don’t have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

• “It was darker than a carload of assholes” (George V. Higgins)

• “I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief” (Raymond Chandler).

• Everything I’ve said about dialogue applies to building characters in fiction. The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.

• We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say “Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day” or “Annie seemed particularly happy that day.” If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.

• We’ve covered some basic aspects of good storytelling, all of which return to the same core ideas: that practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable.

• But no matter how you do it, there comes a point when you must judge what you’ve written and how well you wrote

• But no matter how you do it, there comes a point when you must judge what you’ve written and how well you wrote it. I don’t believe a story or a novel should be allowed outside the door of your study or writing room unless you feel confident that it’s reasonably reader-friendly.

• Two examples of the sort of work second drafts were made for are symbolism and theme.

• Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of War of the Worlds)

• Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity.

• Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.

• There’s a story that the architect of the Flatiron Building committed suicide when he realized, just before the ribbon-cutting ceremony, that he had neglected to put any men’s rooms in his prototypical skyscraper. Probably not true, but remember this: someone really did design the Titanic and then label it unsinkable.

• Most of all, I’m looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I’ll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning. I’ll also want to delete stuff that goes in other directions.

• The truth is that most writers are needy. Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in.

• Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open

• I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.

• In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I’d like to think I’ve done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can’t decide what you should do next.