On Writing

On Writing by Stephen King is half memoir and half craft manual, and it’s the rare writing book that deserves a permanent spot on the shelf. King spends the first half telling you how he became a writer and the second half telling you how to be one. The advice is plain, the examples are his own, and there’s no filler. If you’re only going to read one book about the craft, this is a defensible choice for the one, and I say that as someone who owns most of the others.

The book runs in five parts, and the shape matters.

It opens with a long autobiographical stretch King calls his C.V. Then a short section on what writing is. Then the Toolbox. That covers the mechanics. Then the section literally titled On Writing. That holds the craft advice most people come for. It closes with On Living, his account of the 1999 accident that nearly killed him. People skip to the craft section and miss the point. The memoir isn’t throat-clearing before the real content.

It’s the evidence. By the time he tells you the road to hell is paved with adverbs, you believe him, because you’ve watched him write his way out of a trailer, out of a laundromat job, out of addiction, and back from a van that left him in a ditch.

The Memoir Half Is the Argument

King grew up poor, raised with his brother by a single mother who moved the family around. He wrote as a kid, copying comic books and then inventing his own. He sold stories to men’s magazines for beer money while teaching high school English and living in a trailer.

He famously threw the first pages of Carrie in the wastebasket, and his wife Tabitha fished them out and told him to keep going. That book was the one that got him out. None of this is told for sympathy.

It’s told so that when the advice comes, you understand it was earned at a workbench instead of handed down from a podium.

The closing section on the accident makes the same point from the other end. King was hit by a van while walking and very nearly died, and he wrote about the long recovery and how getting back to the desk was part of healing. He wrote this book recovering from that. The section on showing up and doing the work whether or not you feel like it reads differently when you know the man writing it could barely sit up.

Watch: 10 Writing Tips from Stephen King for Writers and Screenwriters, Outstanding Screenplays

What is in the toolbox in On Writing?

The single idea most worth carrying out of this book is the toolbox.

King describes his grandfather’s literal toolbox, a heavy thing with multiple trays, and argues a writer should have the same. You bring all your tools to the job and you keep the most-used ones on top. The top tray holds vocabulary and grammar, the common tools you reach for constantly. The fancy tools, the rare words and the show-off constructions, live in the bottom drawer where they belong.

The metaphor reframes craft as a trade instead of a mystery, and that reframe is exactly what most new writers need. I’ve written more than a hundred books and ghostwritten dozens more, and I still think about that toolbox when a sentence gets too clever for its own good.

Inside the toolbox sit his two most quoted rules. The first is his war on adverbs. King writes that the adverb isn’t your friend, that they spring up like dandelions, and that the road to hell is paved with them. His example is “He closed the door firmly.” The word firmly is doing work the surrounding prose should have already done. If the writer builds the scene right, the reader already knows how he closed the door, and the adverb is just the writer flinching, afraid of not being understood.

The fix isn’t a better adverb. The fix is a stronger verb and clearer context, the same argument behind leaning on strong verbs instead of propping up weak ones.

The second rule is his attack on the passive voice. King says timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason timid lovers like passive partners, because the passive voice is safe. It lets the writer avoid asserting that a subject did a deliberate thing. “The rope was thrown by the writer” hides behind grammar. “The writer threw the rope” takes responsibility. He wants you to take responsibility, sentence after sentence, and the cumulative effect of doing that’s prose with a spine.

Writing Is Telepathy

The most interesting idea in the craft half is the one people quote least. King calls writing telepathy. He sets a small scene, a table with a red cloth and a cage with a rabbit and the number eight on its back, and points out that he wrote it at one time and you’re reading it at another, and yet the same image now sits in both heads across all that distance. That’s the whole transaction. Your job is to transmit the image cleanly.

Everything else, the adverb-cutting and the verb-strengthening and the rewriting, is in service of getting the picture from your head into the reader’s with as little distortion as possible.

He pairs this with his idea that stories are found things, fossils you excavate instead of monuments you build.

The writer’s job is to get as much of the fossil out of the ground intact as possible. It’s a humbling way to think about plot, and it’s why King distrusts heavy outlining. He starts with a situation, drops believable people into it, and watches what they do. Situation comes first, plot comes second, and character turns the one into the other.

The Practical Rules

King is specific about the working life. Write every day, with a target he sets at around a thousand words, and keep the door shut while you draft so the story stays between you and the page. Rewrite with the door open, once the world is allowed back in. His formula for revision is second draft equals first draft minus ten percent, and he means it as a real number.

Read constantly, because every book teaches you something, including the bad ones. They teach you what not to do. And tell the truth, because readers forgive a great deal but they can feel a lie on the page.

He also tells you to stop watching so much television, to expect more rejection than you think you can stand, to quit trying to please everyone, and to take the work seriously without taking yourself too seriously. He grants exactly one exception to his suspicion of writing rules. That is The Elements of Style by Strunk and White, eighty-some pages he thinks every writer should read. Coming from a man this skeptical of rules, that’s a strong endorsement.

What It Is Not

The book isn’t a system. It won’t give you a beat sheet, a plot grid, or a genre formula. If you want paint-by-numbers structure, this is the wrong book, and King would be the first to tell you so. It’s also a book of opinions stated as commandments, and a few of them are arguable. Plenty of fine writers use adverbs on purpose. Plenty of strong scenes use passive voice for a reason.

King knows this and says so, then tells you to cut them anyway, because he’s teaching defaults instead of absolutes, and the default is the right place for a developing writer to start.

What it gives you instead is permission to take the work seriously and a clear-eyed account of what that costs. It’s short, it’s funny, and it’s honest about failure in a way most craft books are too polished to be. It’s kept its place on my reference shelf through more than two decades of use, and it’s the first book I hand anyone who tells me they want to write.

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