![\"'On](\"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/On-Writing.jpg\" "\\"'On")
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I loved On Writing<\/em><\/a>, a very entertaining and informative book about being a writer. It\u2019s part memoir, part conventional fiction-writing guide, written in an amusing, self-deprecating style. For example, here’s Stephen King describing his first \u2018best-seller\u2019, a novelisation of one of his favourite horror films, self-published when he was at high school:<\/p>\n \u201cWorking with the care and deliberation for which I would later be critically acclaimed, I turned out my novel version of ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ in two days \u2026 blissfully unaware that I was in violation of every plagiarism and copyright statute in the history of the world.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He sold out his entire print run to his fellow students, making an enormous profit, although his principal later made him refund the money and told him to stop wasting his time writing \u201cjunk\u201d. King received advice that was far more useful from the editor of his town\u2019s newspaper, where King had a part-time job writing sports reports:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you write a story, you\u2019re telling yourself the story \u2026 When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not<\/strong> the story.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n King goes on to describe his development as a writer \u2013 studying literature and creative writing at college, writing stories for magazines, then working on his early novels while supporting his young family by teaching high school. His wife fished the opening chapters of Carrie<\/em> out of his wastebasket and convinced him to keep going with it. Carrie<\/em> ended up being his first published book, made him a fortune, and set him off on his career as a best-selling author of horror and speculative fiction. It wasn\u2019t all smooth sailing after that, though, and he writes eloquently about his struggles with alcoholism and drug addiction, and then about his physical rehabilitation after he was nearly killed in a horrific traffic accident.<\/p>\n The second half of the book provides a lot of practical, well-organised advice about writing fiction, although King cautions:<\/p>\n \u201c\u2026no matter how much I want to encourage the man or woman trying for the first time to write seriously, I can\u2019t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots<\/strong> of bad writers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He divides writers into a pyramid, with a lot of bad writers on the base, some competent writers above them, a few \u201creally good\u201d writers above them, and at the apex, the geniuses \u2013 \u201cthe Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys.\u201d He believes it\u2019s impossible to make a bad writer into a competent one, or a good writer into a great one, but that “it is<\/em> possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one\u201d. He also believes that stories are like fossils, “part of an undiscovered pre-existing world”, excavated from the ground using a writer\u2019s box of tools.<\/p>\n His advice includes:<\/p>\n – Read a lot and write a lot. He provides a list of his favourite books (his favourite writers include Pat Barker, Bill Bryson, Annie Proulx, J.K. Rowling, Donna Tartt, Anne Tyler and Evelyn Waugh) and he says that watching television is a waste of time.<\/p>\n – Write quickly, work every day to a schedule, and don\u2019t stop until you\u2019ve finished a draft. He thinks a first draft should take no longer than three months and claims he wrote the first draft of The Running Man<\/em> in a week. However, he does acknowledge that The Stand<\/em> took sixteen months and (probably not coincidentally) is his fans’ favourite book.<\/p>\n – Don\u2019t ever plot, because \u201cplotting and the spontaneity of real creation aren\u2019t compatible\u201d.<\/p>\n – \u201cGood fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.\u201d<\/p>\n – Similarly, symbolism will only become evident once you\u2019ve excavated your story: \u201cIf it is<\/em> there, and if you notice it, I think you should bring it out as well as you can, polishing it till it shines.\u201d<\/p>\n – \u201cDialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others\u201d, which is why H.P. Lovecraft, a painfully shy snob, wrote such terrible, stilted dialogue.<\/p>\n – When revising, remember this important formula: \u201c2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%\u201d<\/p>\n And if you get stuck, remember, \u201cBoredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.\u201d<\/p>\n I can\u2019t say I agreed with all of it (personally, I find plotting essential, and while I\u2019d love to be able to finish a first draft of a novel in three months, I can\u2019t imagine that will ever happen) and some of his advice about finding a publisher is a little dated, because the book was written fifteen years ago. But I found all of it fascinating and I\u2019d recommend this to anyone interested in writing as a craft or as a career. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I loved On Writing, a very entertaining and informative book about being a writer. It\u2019s part memoir, part conventional fiction-writing guide, written in an amusing, self-deprecating style. For example, here’s Stephen King describing his first \u2018best-seller\u2019, a novelisation of one of his favourite horror films, self-published when he was at high school: \u201cWorking with the … Continue reading \u2018On Writing\u2019 by Stephen King<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,8],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-4566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-this-writing-life","tag-stephen-king"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4566"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4579,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4566\/revisions\/4579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}