3 Writing Lessons from Stephen King
Stephen King is often described as the “King of Horror”. His books have sold over 350 million copies and have been adapted into award-winning movies: Misery, The Shining, It, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, along with many others.
Aside from suspense, mystery and horror, he also writes about writing. His book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, shares his key insights.
His perspective on writing is interesting—he describes it as a true form of telepathy. In the book, he does an exercise and writes out the details of an image of a cage with a white rabbit inside. He explains how he is able to “channel” that image into the reader’s mind by describing it. The telepathic transfer isn’t perfect but covers all the important aspects.
I’ve summarized the book’s key ideas below. I hope they’re as interesting to others as they have been to me.
The Origin of Stories
The most surprising lesson from the book is King’s opinion about the origin of stories.
“My basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course).”
He talks about this process of growing and transcribing stories throughout the book. It’s as though he doesn’t craft his stories; instead, he unravels them.
One such story came to him while he was a high-school janitor. That role put him back into familiar settings, and he was struck by memories of the torment dealt to the unpopular girls. He combined that with his recollection of a Life magazine article that suggested some people might display telekinetic powers arising with puberty. This image became the opening scene of his first successful book, Carrie.
Before it was a book, however, the idea sat on the back-burner, simmering, for nearly 6 years. When it was finally ready, he went about excavating that single vision from his mind. He let the story arise, playing out the situation and how the characters would respond to it. As this insight flowed out, he transcribed the descriptions and dialogues that he uncovered.
This process of uncovering removes the need for plotting, which King describes as excavating with a jackhammer.
“Plot is…the writer’s jackhammer. You can liberate a fossil from hard ground with a jackhammer, no argument there, but you know as well as I do that the jackhammer is going to break almost as much stuff as it liberates. It’s clumsy, mechanical, anticreative. Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.”
Two Drafts and a Polish
King’s most pragmatic advice is about drafting. He does exactly two drafts and a polish. After the idea pops into his head and he’s ready to work, he focuses all his time on it until he’s uncovered the full story.
“With the door shut, downloading what’s in my head directly to the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable. Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. If I write rapidly,…only looking back to check the names of my characters and […] their backstories, I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in.”
For a novel, King says this period is usually 6 to 9 months. Although I’ve never tried to write something that long, I have felt my enthusiasm to write wane if I let things drag on too long.
The first draft is done with the door closed—no one else is allowed to see it. Not his wife, his friends, or his editor. This keeps him focused on the story in his mind, not on the underlying symbolism, or how wonderful his writing is. Instead it helps him stay focused on actually writing the story.
Once that first draft is done, he puts it away and ignores it for a long time (for novels, about 6 weeks). This gives the book time to age and mellow, and it gives him time for his mind and imagination to rejuvenate. He describes returning to the manuscript after that period away as a unique experience:
“You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours… and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps.”
And this new view of the story allows him to find all the latent issues:
“With six weeks’ worth of recuperation time, you’ll also be able to see any glaring holes in the plot or character development. I’m talking about holes big enough to drive a truck through. It’s amazing how some of these things can elude the writer while he or she is occupied with the daily work of composition.”
The second draft begins with this reread. The main goal now is clarifying and editing. Luckily, King has an exact editing formula: 2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%.
People’s first drafts tend to be wordy. The second draft is a time to communicate the same idea without the unnecessary words. A 10% reduction is a good target for ensuring only the key words remain.
“Before the Formula, if I produced a story that was four thousand words or so in first draft, it was apt to be five thousand in second (some writers are taker-outers; I’m afraid I’ve always been a natural putter-inner). After the Forumla, that changed. Even today I will aim for a second-draft length of thirty-six hundred words in the first draft of a story ran four thousand.”
Writer’s Toolbox
King likens writing technique to a toolbox. Each writer should build their own and develop the strength to carry it around, ready to work on whatever needs writing. Each level of the toolbox serves a different purpose, and has its own importance.
The first level is for the most common tools: vocabulary and grammar. King is famous for saying that you should throw away your thesaurus. Any word you have to look up is the wrong one.
“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. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
He also says you should make no conscious effort to improve your vocabulary. Instead, it should happen naturally from reading. King reads ~80 books a year (and says he’s a slow reader) and recommends that you bring a book with you everywhere you go. Here’s a list of his top 100 book recommendations.
For grammar, King says it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a copy of Warrimer’s English Grammar and Composition for a quick overview. Part of understanding grammar is knowing when it’s alright to break the rules, and King quotes the following:
“Unless he is certain of doing well, [the writer] will probably do best to follow the rules.”
William Strunk, The Elements of Style
When it comes to grammar, King stresses to avoid two things: passive voice and adverbs.
“Passive voice…makes me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous as well. How about this: ‘My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun.’ Oh, man — who farted, right?”
Passive voice is comfortable and safe, but weak. It should be kept to business memos and police reports.
As for adverbs, King recommends you avoid them, especially in dialogue attribution. No one needs to hear about how “excitedly” you shouted. That should be clear from the context.
“With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he is afraid he isn’t expressing himself clearly and that he is not getting the point or the picture across.”
King says that bad writing happens out of fear — fear that the writer will be misunderstood. Don’t provide clarity with adverbs; use better narration, dialogue, and descriptions.
You may feel you have a great toolbox to work from, or maybe that you could improve a few things. If it’s the latter, King offers up this advice:
“You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed.”
Summary
King’s book is great motivation to write more and to write better. He succeeds in his telepathy and transmits a clear picture of his views on writing. Although it’s mostly focused on fiction, I felt that his ideas applied to nonfiction writing as well. If you’d like to improve your writing, it’s definitely worth the read. You can get it here.
Have you already read On Writing? What was your biggest takeaway? Do you have a favorite book about writing? Please share in the comments below.
