On Writing is Stephen King’s musings on his craft—about how he discovered writing, what he learned about it, and his advice to you as a writer. Part memoir and part practical advice, it’s a personal look at one of the bestselling authors of all time.
Born in 1947, King was raised by his mother—his father disappeared when he was two. He had a brother, older by two years, who involved him in boyish hijinks. They were working class, his mother working jobs as a baker, then as a launderer as they moved around New England. Eventually they settled in Maine, living with their ailing grandparents.
King began writing when he was six. Because of several rounds of medical issues—measles, ear infections, and tonsillitis—he spent most of his time at home and was held back from finishing first grade. With plenty of free time, King devoured comic books and fiction books.
He started writing by imitating: he copied stories from comic books word for word. When he showed the copies to his mother, she urged him to write his own stories—he could do better than the crude comic books.
The idea of creating his own stories felt like an open world of possibilities. He soon wrote a four-page story about four magic animals adventuring to help children. He showed it to his mother, who laughed while reading it and declared it was “good enough to be in a book.” This remains King’s favorite praise.
As a teenager, King wrote stories and submitted them to magazines. Whenever he got a rejection slip, he’d stick it onto the nail, like a stack of receipts at a diner.
By the time he was 14, he’d gotten so many rejection slips that the nail couldn’t hold up any longer. He hammered a sturdier spike into the wall and continued writing.
By the time he was 16, his rejection letters began sounding warmer. Said an editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “This isn’t for us, but it’s good. You have talent. Try again.”
After graduating from college, King worked at a laundry for $1.60 an hour. His wife Tabitha, a fellow writer whom he met at college, worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.
King continued writing during his breaks at the laundry and after work. It was tough going. He’d only occasionally sell his stories, and they were on the brink of needing to accept welfare. He was mortified that he might simply be reliving his mother’s life (she, too, worked in a laundry to support her family), and thought that surely their lives should be going better.
King soon found a job teaching English at a nearby high school. It paid $6,400 per year, which was a temporary relief. But it soon exacted a large cost on his writing energy. Between the teaching, after-school meetings, and grading homework, he was too exhausted to write. He began despairing for his future as a writer—might he become one of those disillusioned English instructors, always claiming to work on that breakthrough novel but never having the courage or perseverance to really get something real done?
During summer months when school was out, King continued working in the laundry. One day, he recalled a memory from college when he cleaned the girls’ shower room as a janitor, and now he envisioned an opening scene: a group of girls showering in the bathroom, when one of them starts bleeding from her period. The girl has no idea what’s happening to her; the other girls start jeering and throwing tampons at her, and the girl starts screaming.
At the same time, he remembered reading an amazing article about telekinesis (manipulating objects with your mind). The article suggested young people might have powers, especially girls around the age when they had their first periods. Right there, out of nowhere, from the fusion of two distant and unrelated memories, King stumbled upon the idea for Carrie. (King admits that his story ideas often come out of nowhere, the sudden collision of normal ideas.).
It didn’t stand out as a particularly good idea, but one night he worked on three pages of his draft. He didn’t like it, and he threw the pages into the trash. His wife, eternally supportive, uncrumpled the papers, read it, and thought there was something there. She encouraged him to push through, and as he continued writing dozens of pages, he began feeling that there was something there too.
In 1973, he sent the manuscript off to Doubleday and forgot about it. One day, while he was teaching, Tabitha phoned the office with news—they’d bought Carrie and would send an advance of $2,500, a sizable fraction of his annual salary.
The book took a year to get published, coming out in the spring of 1974, and by that time King had mentally moved on. One day, while alone in the house, he got a call from his contact at Doubleday—Carrie’s paperback rights were sold for $400,000. King was speechless.
From this triumph, King’s writing career took off. From that point on, King published roughly one to two novels per year, including The Shining in 1977, Cujo in 1981, and Misery in 1987. He faced demons along the way, including alcohol and drug addiction (he became sober around 1986) and a car accident in 1999. Through it all, writing gave his life joy.
Improving as a writer requires hard work. There are no shortcuts. You need to read a lot and write a lot. A good sign of whether you’ll make it as a writer is whether you enjoy reading and writing for their own sake.
One sign of talent is enjoying the hard work. What seems like labor to other people is pleasure for you.
Stephen King reads 80 books a year, despite professing to be a slow reader. He doesn’t read to learn, he reads because he likes reading. And when he writes (2,000 words a day), it typically feels like playtime to him—it’s the rest of life, with the errands and the bills and the “relaxing” that feels like work to him.
If you don’t enjoy reading and writing, then you won’t become a good writer. But “if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
To be a good writer, you need to recognize what good and bad writing is. Reading exposes you to good and bad writing. The more you read, the more you learn. Stephen King always carries a book with him so he can read whether he’s waiting at the grocery or sitting front-row at a Red Sox game.
Often the bad writing is more instructive than the good writing. It teaches you what not to do—what’s cliche, how characters act unrealistically, how writers ruin the pacing with plodding description. It could even be inspirational—if you think a bestseller is terribly written, then you might start thinking you could easily do better.
Through thousands of hours of reading, you sharpen the tools in your toolkit. You absorb other people’s writing rhythm, how they develop their characters and plot, and how they wield language. You take what you like and forge your own style.
King is famously prolific: He writes ten pages a day, or 2,000 words. Every three months he produces about 900 pages, a good-sized novel. He dedicates his morning to writing time, and he doesn’t move on with the rest of his day until he finishes his writing goal.
If you’re a new writer, here’s how to get started:
You can write about anything. The only requirement is that you tell the truth.
Good writing pulls readers in by telling the truth. The characters seem real and behave in recognizable ways; the reader sees herself and her beliefs embedded in the story. In contrast, you likely stop reading a book when you can’t identify with any of the characters and find them implausible.
You’ll probably start by writing in the genres you like to read—if you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll write science fiction. You might even emulate the style of writers you like, which is nearly unavoidable for novice writers until they develop their own voices.
What you shouldn’t do is write what you think other people will like—friends, colleagues, critics, book buyers. Don’t try to emulate the form, plot and style of bestselling authors. All this takes you away from authenticity, and your readers will know.
So write what you know and like, and bring your truths into the story. You know some unique truths about the world, which will make your writing unique.
A writer is an artisan who has a number of tools in her toolbox available for use—diction, grammar, phrasing. You likely already have these tools, so don’t worry that you don’t understand them well enough to be a writer. For dependable guidelines, look to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
King does single out two of his pet peeves—passive tense and adverbs.
Passive tense arranges words so that things are done to subjects. “The car was started by the driver.” “The discovery was announced with great fanfare.” “The meeting is scheduled for seven.”
All of these sentences sound weak. In active tense, the subject does the action. “The driver started the car.” “The grandmaster announced the discovery with great fanfare.” “The meeting’s at seven.” Don’t these sentences feel better?
This is common enough advice, but why do writers still use passive voice? Because it’s safe. Passive voice avoids the need to assert a subject doing a deliberate action. Passive voice is the refuge of timid, uncertain writers.
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They usually end in -ly, as in “Tom started the car dejectedly.”
Like passive voice, adverbs are a sign of weak, timid writing. Writers often use adverbs to make sure the reader knows exactly what is happening, but this blunts the power of the verb.
Instead of using adverbs, make the context clear so that the adverb becomes unnecessary. If Tom is starting the car, the prose preceding it should be so clear it makes “dejectedly” redundant: “Tom sat for ten minutes, imagining the look on his boss’s face as he pounded out the email at 3AM that morning. He sighed and started the car.”:
Stories consist of three things:
King hates the idea of pre-planning a story’s plot. This feels artificial. Our lives are plotless—we don’t know in advance what’s going to happen—and that gives life a constantly surprising, entertaining flavor. Writing a story should be the same.
Instead, King believes the story reveals itself as he writes. He doesn’t force the action to move in a particular direction; the characters decide what to do, and he merely narrates what is happening as he observes it.
He analogizes writing like this to archaeology: The story already exists, buried in the dirt like a fossil. Your job is to unearth it delicately.
What does this mean, in practice? King typically starts his stories with a situation, then discovers how his characters work their way out of the situation. Interesting situations typically start as “what if?”
From there, he lets the story develop without an ironfisted demand for what should happen. He usually doesn’t know how the story will end. Instead, he watches the characters work their way through the situation. The characters may surprise him with their ingenuity or complexity; King doesn’t know what they’re going to do until they do it.
Description provides sensory texture to the story, which draws the reader in viscerally. You’ll primarily describe the environment and the characters.
You don’t want too little or too much description.
Aim for the middle. Provide enough detail to seed the reader’s imagination, but not so much that you prevent the reader from filling in her own details. As you visualize a scene, choose the few details that immediately come to mind.
Dialogue is what characters say. It defines who they are and what they’re like.
The best dialogue sounds truthful—a reader believes that real people would talk that way. Wooden dialogue sounds forced and grates on the ear.
Writers vary in their ability to write good dialogue. Part of it depends on how writers interact with people. Writers who write the best dialogue like listening to other people, absorbing their rhythms, accents, and slang. Recluses often don’t know how real people talk and so find it hard to make their characters talk convincingly.
Beyond these three basic elements, the writing toolbox contains many other tools, like symbolism, themes, and back story.
King’s advice on these tools is to make use of any tool that will enhance your story. Like spices in a recipe, they add flavor and character to the writing. But don’t go too far—remember that the point of the story is to tell a story, not to show how many words you can alliterate.
How do you get from first draft to final draft? Here’s Stephen King’s writing process:
Some writers struggle with incorporating feedback healthily. Changing your masterpiece novel simply because your readers didn’t like it feels like a corruption of art.
But if you feel this way, why invite readers you respect to review your draft at all? If it’s simply because you want adulation for what a genius you are, then at least be honest about what you’re looking for. Instead, think of reviewers as your own personal focus group.
If your reviewers are unanimous about one direction (whether something is great or terrible), they’re probably right. If they’re tied on an issue, then you win and don’t have to change anything.
There is usually one person whose opinion you trust above all: the Ideal Reader. For King, it’s his wife Tabitha.
The Ideal Reader is the person you have in mind as you write. You come to know your Ideal Reader’s tastes so well you can predict how he or she will feel about any particular thing you’re writing. Will she laugh at this scene? Will she get bored here if I explain too much? The Ideal Reader helps give you an audience as you write and is perhaps the only exception to writing with the door closed.
The Ideal Reader should also be a honest reviewer—eternally supportive but unrelenting. You might disagree with Ideal Reader’s feedback, but you know there’s truth to it.
Now you know how to produce writing that tells the truth. How do you survive on this writing? King ends his advice with practicalities of getting an agent, getting published, and writing programs.
Here are tips on building a writing career:
In the first part of the book, King shares vignettes of his early life, from childhood to his discovery of writing to his early career as a struggling author. While it’s full of entertaining anecdotes, we’ll focus on the events that seemed to have shaped him most as a writer.
Born in 1947, King was raised by his mother—his father disappeared when he was two. He had a brother, older by two years, who involved him in boyish hijinks. They were working class, his mother working jobs as a baker, then as a launderer as they moved around New England. Eventually they settled in Maine, living with their ailing grandparents.
King began writing when he was six. Because of several rounds of medical issues—measles, ear infections, and tonsillitis—he spent most of his time at home and was held back from finishing first grade. With plenty of free time, King devoured comic books and fiction books.
He started writing by imitating: he copied stories from comic books word for word. He showed his masterwork to his mother, who was amused. She asked if he’d come up with the stories himself. He admitted he hadn’t, and she looked disappointed. She urged him to write his own story—he could do better than the crude comic books.
The idea of creating his own stories felt like an open world of possibilities. He soon wrote a four-page story about four magic animals adventuring to help children. He showed it to his mother, who laughed while reading it and declared it was “good enough to be in a book.” This remains King’s favorite praise.
He wrote four more stories, and his mother paid him a quarter for each. That’s how King earned his first dollar as a writer.
He continued writing stories and submitting them to publications. He published his first story in an amateur horror magazine; his title, before the publisher changed it: “I Was a Teen-age Graverobber.”
Stephen King doesn’t know where good story ideas come from. They just sort of appear. Sometimes they come from seeing something in front of you. Sometimes two unrelated ideas collide and create something inspired and original.
The key isn’t to sit and come up with good ideas—it’s to recognize a good idea when it does appear.
He remembers the first time he came up with a really good idea. He was around 13, and his mother was compiling trading stamps, trying to save enough to buy his sister a Christmas gift. (Shortform note: Trading stamps were an early form of loyalty program. Companies like S&H Green Stamps would print stamps, which were bought by vendors like supermarkets to give to their customers as incentives to shop. Customers would then collect these stamps, stick them in stamp booklets, and redeem them for items.)
Frustrated with not having enough stamps for the gift, his mother stuck her tongue out in exasperation. It was colored green from licking the stamps. King thought it’d be nice if you could print your own stamps. A story idea flashed in his mind. It was about a money counterfeiter who discovers he could get anything with enough stamps—even a house for his mother, costing just eleven million stamp books.
The counterfeiter excitedly prints millions of stamps in his basement with a press and begins fixing them to stamp books with an adhesive machine, until he discovers a problem—the glue he’s been using discolors the stamps, rendering them worthless. He has only one alternative—affix the stamps by licking, as usual. Looking around at his millions of stamps, he dejectedly gets to work licking, and licking, and licking. His lips, tongue, and teeth have already been stained pink, but he continues licking to get his mother her house.
King submitted the stamp story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and he got a cold rejection letter telling him to use a paper clip instead of staples to bind his submission. He pinned the letter on the wall with a nail. From then on, whenever he got a rejection slip, he’d stick it onto the nail, like a stack of receipts at a diner.
By the time he was 14, he’d gotten so many rejection slips that the nail couldn’t hold up any longer. He hammered a sturdier spike into the wall and continued writing.
By the time he was 16, his rejection letters began sounding warmer. Said an editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “This isn’t for us, but it’s good. You have talent. Try again.”
From his early teens, Stephen King loved movies. There were only two movie theaters in town. One theater showed only family-friendly fare—Disney cartoons and musicals. King found these wholesome, predictable, and boring. He didn’t want to see manicured actors singing happily on a stage; he wanted destruction of cities and monsters devouring humans.
He found these films in plentiful supply at the other theater. King fondly recalls a dozen movies, ranging from I Married a Monster from Outer Space to Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. He’d watch a movie every weekend he could and anytime he could hitch a ride.
One particular favorite was a loose adaptation of Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (his favorite scene was one showing the corpse of a woman who had been buried alive, her mouth agape in a scream). He was so enamored of the film that he decided he’d write a novelized adaptation of it (“blissfully unaware” of the plagiarism implications), then sell the book to his classmates for a quarter apiece. The plan worked better than expected—he’d replicated the film’s horror well in words—and he sold $9 worth of books.
But the good times didn’t last. He was called into the principal’s office, where he was admonished for selling his wares in a place of education.
Even worse, his teacher castigated him for wasting his writing talent on this kind of trash. This comment stuck with him for years. He would review his writing with shame, wondering if he was indeed wasting his talent. In the present day, King notes that every writer (and every creator, really) will at some point be told that they are wasting their talent and be scolded for not working on something more worthwhile.
After high school, King wanted to enlist to fight in the Vietnam War. He’d get some good life experiences for a book. His mother categorically refused, quipping that with his bad vision, he’d be the first to die.
He enrolled in the University of Maine instead and majored in English. While there, he worked in the library, where he met a fellow writer, Tabitha Spruce. They shared a passion for thoughtful, purposeful writing. See, at the time, the young writers around King seemed to think that good writing came from sudden bursts of formless inspiration, leading to incoherent stream-of-consciousness ramblings.
During a poetry workshop, Tabitha recited a poem she wrote, carefully crafted with clever diction and imaginative imagery. As she explained in the discussion, she had a concrete message behind the poem, a commentary on mankind’s tendencies. King fell in love with her then. They married a year and a half after meeting, and had two children within 3 years after.
After graduating from college, King continued his education to earn a teacher’s certificate, as a backup career in case his writing wouldn’t pay. This wasn’t of much use immediately—he couldn’t get a teaching job, so he worked at a laundry for $1.60 an hour. Tabitha worked at Dunkin’ Donuts.
King continued writing during his breaks at the laundry and after work. It was tough going. He’d only occasionally sell his stories, and they were on the brink of needing to accept welfare. He was mortified that he might simply be reliving his mother’s life (she, too, worked in a laundry to support her family), and thought that surely their lives should be going better.
In one instance, the family was returning from a trip when his daughter developed an ear infection and fever. They knew they needed amoxicillin but couldn’t afford it. Fortuitously, King found an envelope in their mailbox—it was a check for one of his stories, paying $500. It was the largest check he’d received for his writing to date. Relieved, he bought the medicine and treated his family to a dinner.
King soon found a job teaching English at a nearby high school. It paid $6,400 per year, which was a temporary relief. But it soon exacted a large cost on his writing energy. Between the teaching, after-school meetings, and grading homework, he was too exhausted to write. He began despairing for his future as a writer—might he become one of those disillusioned English instructors, always claiming to work on that breakthrough novel but never having the courage or perseverance to really get something real done?
Through these difficult times, his wife Tabitha was a vital source of continuous support. She never chastised him for wasting time writing stories (even horror stories sold to men’s magazines). Having someone who believed in him pulled him through.
During summer months when school was out, King continued working in the laundry. One day, he recalled a memory from when he worked as a janitor in college. He remembered having to clean the girls’ shower and being bewildered at how oddly familiar yet different it was—there were no urinals, but there were tampon dispensers.
Now, as an adult revisiting this memory, King envisioned the opening scene of a story: a group of girls showering in the bathroom, when one of them starts bleeding from her period. The girl has no idea what’s happening to her; the other girls start jeering and throwing tampons at her, and the girl starts screaming.
At the same time, he remembered reading an amazing article about telekinesis (manipulating objects with your mind). The article suggested young people might have powers, especially girls around the age when they had their first periods. Right there, out of nowhere, from the fusion of two distant and unrelated memories, King stumbled upon the idea for Carrie.
It didn’t stand out as a particularly good idea, but he thought it might be solid enough to get another check. It incubated in the back of his mind for some time until one night he typed out three pages.
He didn’t like it. The character (the bleeding girl) seemed too passive, too much of a victim. Even worse, he didn’t know much about teenage girls, and he preferred writing about subjects he was intimately familiar with. He crumpled up the papers and went to bed.
The next day, he returned from school to find Tabitha with the papers. She’d found them in the trash and read it. She thought there was something there and pushed him to keep developing the story.
As he continued writing dozens of pages, he began feeling that there was something here too. Through writing the story, he learned two vital lessons:
In 1973, he sent the manuscript off to Doubleday and forgot about it. One day, while he was teaching, Tabitha phoned the office to give him a message—they’d received a telegram from the publisher (they couldn’t afford a phone), saying they’d buy the book and send an advance of $2,500.
King and Tabitha were elated, and that night their minds churned through the possibilities. Could he quit his teaching? Not on a $2,500 advance—not if he couldn’t continue publishing consistently. How much would paperback rights sell for? Maybe as high as $60,000—Mario Puzo had just gotten $400,000 for an advance for The Godfather, but Carrie wouldn’t get anywhere near that.
The book took a year to get published, coming out in the spring of 1974, and by that time King had mentally moved on. He was working on a new novel, and his mother was starting to show signs of weakened health.
One day, while alone in the house, he got a call from his contact at Doubleday. He shared the news: Carrie’s paperback rights were sold for $400,000. King was shocked, literally speechless. After confirming multiple times that he hadn’t misheard the number of zeroes, he rushed out to get a gift for his wife. When Tabitha returned, he announced the news. She looked at their $90-per-month rental apartment and started crying.
From this triumph, King’s writing career took off. From that point on, King published roughly one to two novels per year, including The Shining in 1977, Cujo in 1981, and Misery in 1987.
But his health belied the success. He had become an alcoholic. He’d already started drinking heavily in the early 1970s, from the beginning of his marriage. When his mother died in 1974, King remembers delivering the eulogy drunk.
Beyond just liking to drink, King also bought into the myth of the genius writer/substance-abuser, in the style of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The excuse that someone like Hemingway might use was that writers are by nature sensitive people, but being sensitive isn’t manly; alcohol dulls the sensitivity and helps the writer cope with the existential crises and lonely despair that writing brings.
By the 1980s, King began using drugs regularly—cocaine, Valium, even cough syrup and mouthwash. He tried to hide his habits, but his struggle surfaced through his writing.
Around the time he wrote The Tommyknockers, his wife staged an intervention. She gathered friends and family, dumped his drug paraphernalia from a garbage bag onto the floor, and demanded that he get better or leave the family. It was too painful watching him slowly poison himself to death.
Initially resistant (as many addicts are), he came around to it. He didn’t want to be the tormented writer in Misery, a captive of his own destructive habits. Most of all, he didn’t want to lose his family. He quit the alcohol and drugs.
King was scared that his creativity and writing energy would disappear with the alcohol, but this wasn’t the case at all. His writing wasn’t always perfect, but he began rediscovering a sober joy in his writing. Through his recovery, he never stopped writing.
From here, King focuses on his practical advice to writers, using his personal writing experience to illustrate the point. We’ll start with general mindsets on understanding writing.
Telepathy is the transmission of thoughts without any interaction. Telepathy has been the stuff of science fiction and also of vigorous scientific denial. Most people would confidently state that telepathy doesn’t exist.
Yet writing is telepathy. It is the magical beaming of ideas from one person, writing in some corner of the world at some time, to another person, without the two ever needing to be close enough to shake hands. Writing can take ideas from thousands of miles away and years in the past—even thousands of years—and implant them in your brain, as alive as they were when originally conceived.
To demonstrate this, King describes a scene. Imagine a table with a red table cloth. On it is a cage holding a white rabbit, which is happily eating a carrot. On the rabbit’s back is painted a blue number 8. See it?
All of a sudden, you and the author are imagining the very same thing. Never mind that he wrote this years ago in a place you’ve never been. At this time, you and Stephen King have joined your minds. He transmitted that picture of the rabbit in the cage with the number 8, and you received it, like a radio antenna. This is telepathy.
Writers fit into a pyramid of quality.
At the bottom are bad writers. They might violate basic elements of style, such as using passive voice and adverbs. They might write implausible plots and shallow characters. Often, bad writers don’t know that they’re bad.
Next level up are competent writers, a slightly smaller but still large group. These people seem more conscious of what makes for bad writing.
Next level up are good writers, a much smaller group. They understand the fundamentals of writing and have a good command of the tools in their toolkit. King places himself into this group.
Finally, at the top level are great writers—the Shakespeares, the Steinbecks. These people are often gifted in ways we mortal writers can’t understand; they often can’t understand it themselves.
According to King, it’s impossible to make a bad writer competent, and it’s impossible to make a good writer great. But it is possible for a competent writer to become good, through hard work and good guidance.
Do not approach writing lightly. It’s not a casual activity like putting on your pants or cleaning your desk. To improve as a writer, you need to work your ass off. Otherwise, you should simply be happy about where you are as a writer.
It doesn’t mean you need to write without a sense of humor or treat writing as sacrosanct. But you do need to treat writing seriously.
Even though writing is serious, it shouldn’t be your reason for existing. Life doesn’t exist to support art; art exists to support life.
This idea can materialize even in your choice of writing environment. For much of his early career, King pined for a behemoth of a writing desk that would sit sturdily in the middle of a room, dominating the space. As an addict, he would sit at this intimidating desk, inebriated and writing away.
Once he got sober, he cleared out the room and put in a comfortable living room setup instead. A sofa took the place where his previous desk was; he moved his writing place to a smaller desk at the corner of the room. This room was much more inviting—his family would sometimes come up and watch television with him, and he enjoyed that.
On the mechanical level, writing is made up of words, sentences, and paragraphs. How you choose words, in what sequence you use them, and how you divide them all affect the quality of your writing.
A writer is an artisan who has a number of tools in her toolbox available for use—diction, grammar, phrasing. You likely already have these tools, so don’t worry that you don’t understand them well enough to be a writer.
If you’re new to serious writing, examine each of these tools you have. If they’re rusty, clean them off. But don’t be embarrassed about the tools that you have; you likely have enough to start writing. And if you keep reading and writing without pause, as King recommends, you will polish your tools so that they do exactly what you want them to.
For dependable guidelines, look to The Elements of Style by Strunk and White.
Diction is the choice of words you use in your writing. It draws from the vocabulary you have.
Don’t feel ashamed if you feel your vocabulary is weak. “It’s not how big it is; it’s how you use it.”
There is good writing of both extensive vocabulary and pedestrian vocabulary. Here are two examples:
“The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organization, and pertained to some paleogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation.”—H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
“The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney.”—Ernest Hemingway, Big Two-Hearted River
The second passage uses mostly monosyllabic words. All of the words can be understood by a child. Yet Hemingway’s stories still communicate depth and truth.
So whatever vocabulary you have, use it unashamedly. Use whatever word comes first to your mind. Do not mull over your diction and conjure fancy words you wouldn’t ordinarily use. The first word that comes to mind is often the best one. Why would you use any other?
Grammar consists of rules that we collectively agree to uphold to minimize confusion. If you disregard the rules of grammar, you risk confusing your reader.
The last time you really thought about grammar might have been in high school English. Don’t worry—the grammar you need is simple.
At its most basic, a complete sentence is made up of a subject (a noun) and a predicate (a verb). Rocks fall. Tom hovers. Trees explode. You can write as simply as this (Hemingway pretty much did).
From this baseline, you can construct more complicated sentences, with dependent and independent clauses, participial phrases, and so on. But when you get stuck, never forget that the minimum you need is a noun and a verb.
You can break grammar rules when they serve your purpose. For instance, you can write incomplete sentences to produce the rhythm you want to telepathically transmit to the reader.
At the same time, you can follow grammar rules but produce poor writing. King has two glaring dislikes: passive tense and adverbs.
Passive tense arranges words so that things are done to subjects. “The car was started by the driver.” “The discovery was announced with great fanfare.” “The meeting is scheduled for seven.”
All of these sentences sound weak. In active tense, the subject does the action. “The driver started the car.” “The grandmaster announced the discovery with great fanfare.” “The meeting’s at seven.” Don’t these sentences feel better?
This is common enough advice, but why do writers still use passive voice? Because it’s safe. Passive voice avoids the need to assert a subject doing a deliberate action. Passive voice is the refuge of timid, uncertain writers.
Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They usually end in -ly, as in “Tom started the car dejectedly.”
Like passive voice, adverbs are a sign of weak, timid writing. Writers often use adverbs to make sure the reader knows exactly what is happening. The side effect of adverbs is to blunt the power of the verb.
Shortform example: Take this passage from Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, a notorious abuser of adverbs.
“‘As if you could outrun me,’ he laughed bitterly.
He reached up with one hand and, with a deafening crack, effortlessly ripped a two-foot-thick branch from the trunk of the spruce.
… I’d never seen him so completely freed of that carefully cultivated facade.”
This passage could be rewritten without adverbs:
“‘As if you could outrun me,’ he laughed.
He reached up for a two-foot-thick branch on a spruce and ripped it off with a deafening crack.
...I’d never seen him so free of his facade.”
Instead of using adverbs, make the context clear so that the adverb becomes unnecessary. If Tom is starting the car, the prose preceding it should be so clear it makes “dejectedly” redundant.
Shortform example:
Tom sat for ten minutes, imagining the look on his boss’s face as he pounded out the email at 3AM that morning. He sighed and started the car.
Poor writers also use adverbs in dialogue to break up the monotony, as in “‘Put down the gun,’ she pleaded tentatively.” Delete the adverb, and as a default use the simple “he said, she said” construction.
The pattern underlying bad writing is fear—fear that your reader won’t understand you, or fear that you sound like a simpleton. Have confidence. You probably know what you’re talking about, and good writing is about how well you tell the truth, not how fancy your language is.
Paragraphs are the next level of organization above the sentence.
Paragraphs communicate rhythm and intensity. Detailed expository writing has dense, long paragraphs. Easy fiction has short paragraphs and airy dialogue. When you open a book, you can tell at a glance what the writing will be like.
In expository writing, paragraphs tend to have a logical structure—a topic sentence, followed by sentences that support the topic sentence. This is a methodical structure that keeps the thinking organized and the writing focused on the topic.
In fiction, you have more freedom. You can use paragraphs to communicate a rhythm and beat, to enhance character descriptions or actions, to transition. You can break up a cohesive paragraph into multiple short paragraphs to transmit the right energy. A paragraph can be as short as a single word or as long as a dozen pages.
Paragraphs may communicate more than the sentences they contain. Thus King considers the paragraph, not the sentence, as the basic unit of writing.
Improving as a writer requires hard work. There are no shortcuts.
One sign of talent is enjoying the hard work. What seems like labor to other people is pleasure for you.
Stephen King reads 80 books a year, despite professing to be a slow reader. He doesn’t read to learn, he reads because he likes reading. And when he writes (2,000 words a day), it typically feels like playtime to him—it’s the rest of life, with the errands and the bills and the “relaxing” that feels like work to him. He categorically denies ever having written for money—it’s all out of pure joy.
For King, writing is fun on a few levels. On a mechanical level, he relishes the feeling of arranging words in just the right order. On a higher level, he’s inspired by the idea of enriching the lives of his readers and how writing enriches his own life.
If you don’t feel the joy, you might not have the talent. King tells a story about his son getting inspired to play the saxophone. King gave him a saxophone and a teacher, and waited to see what would happen. His son became technically competent, but he didn’t show the exuberant spontaneity of talent. He diligently met his prescribed half-hour practice sessions, but never went beyond them. He mastered the scales, but he didn’t riff the way people who love music do. Ultimately they all agreed he should stop and find somewhere else he might be more talented.
If you don’t enjoy reading and writing, then you won’t become a good writer. But “if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”
To be a good writer, you need to recognize what good and bad writing is. Reading exposes you to good and bad writing. The more you read, the more you learn.
Often the bad writing is more instructive than the good writing. It teaches you what not to do—what’s cliche and needs to be avoided, how characters act unrealistically, how writers ruin the pacing of a story with plodding description. It might even be inspirational—if you think a bestseller is terribly written, then you might start thinking you could easily do better.
Good writing teaches you what to do. It has style, believable characters, and good plot pacing. It shows you what is possible with the written word. Good writing can be intimidating, but it can also be inspirational—even if you fear you’ll never reach Steinbeck’s level, you can still labor to brush up against it.
Through thousands of hours of reading, you sharpen the tools in your toolkit. You absorb other people’s writing rhythm, how they develop their characters and plot, and how they wield language. You take what you like and forge your own style.
At the end of the book, King covers hundreds of books he’s enjoyed through the decades since On Writing was published. They cover a wide range of genres and time periods, from classics of Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad to contemporary bestseller authors like Peter Abrahams and Lee Child.
Bring a book with you and read wherever you can. If you have a dull moment—waiting in a line, in traffic, eating alone—read. Audiobooks make it even easier to absorb a book while otherwise occupied.
Stop watching television. It’s intellectual junk food, and it’s not going to help you become a better writer. Quitting it will probably make you happier. (Shortform note: Today, he’d likely extend this to aimless Internet browsing and social media.)
How much should you write everyday? It depends on the writer.
James Joyce was a famously slow writer. There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about him moaning to a friend that he’d only written seven words that day—and he didn’t know what order they went in! Harper Lee wrote only one book, To Kill a Mockingbird—King wonders how she spent her time and why she didn’t do more with her talent.
On the other hand, prolific writers, naturally, write a lot. Anthony Trollope, producer of tomes like the 848-page Can You Forgive Her?, wrote for two and a half hours every morning before he went to his day job in the postal service. English writer John Creasey wrote 600 novels under 28 pseudonyms in his lifetime.
King is famously prolific, which isn’t a surprise given his personal working schedule:
Your writing location should be a dedicated place where you block out the rest of the world, because you’re creating your own world.
Most likely, you’ll work best in a place that’s yours, not a coffee shop or a park bench.
Eliminate all distractions possible—your phone, the view out the window, alarms. Shut your door so people know not to disturb you. This doesn’t have to mean silence—King listens to loud hard rock while writing, but his music is another way of blocking out the rest of the world.
If you’re a new writer, it’s asking too much to adopt King’s demanding daily process. Here’s how he suggests you get started:
You can write about anything. The only requirement is that you tell the truth.
Good writing pulls readers in by telling the truth. The characters seem real and behave in recognizable ways; the reader sees herself and her beliefs embedded in the story. In contrast, you likely stop reading a book when you can’t identify with any of the characters and find them implausible.
It’s common advice for starting writers to “write what you know.” Interpret this liberally. It’s not what you literally know (otherwise you couldn’t write about going to Mars) but rather about the truths you understand—what life feels like, how romance and friendships develop, the details of your work. Don’t take “write what you know” to artificially limit what you feel capable of writing about.
Before becoming a writer, John Grisham was a lawyer, and he took what he knew about law (details of whitecollar crime, the savagery of law firms) to write his breakthrough novel The Firm. The world and characters are believable, because they came from John Grisham’s truth.
You’ll probably start by writing in the genres you like to read—if you’re a science fiction fan, you’ll write science fiction. You might even emulate the style of writers you like, which is nearly unavoidable for novice writers until they develop their own voices.
What you shouldn’t do is write what you think other people will like—friends, colleagues, critics, book buyers. Don’t try to emulate the form, plot and style of bestselling authors. All this takes you away from authenticity, and your readers will know.
So write what you know and like, and bring your truths into the story. You know some unique truths about the world, which will make your writing unique.
Some writers wait for inspiration to strike from the heavens, and in its absence they putter about not producing any work. This is not how you get better.
King says his muse isn’t an angel who bestows wonderful ideas with a wand; his muse is a gruff, surly guy living in the basement who wants to see labor before he awards inspiration. Your muse will visit, but you need to have an “Open for business” sign on your door. The best way to show this is to write.
The hardest time during writing is usually at the beginning. Once you start, it gets better.
Stories consist of three things:
Notably, plot isn’t on this list. (Shortform note: He doesn’t define “plot” explicitly, but he implies it means “planning what will happen in the story before you actually write it.”)
We’ll cover each element, starting with why King avoids plot.
Arranging a plot before the story is written feels artificial. Our lives are plotless—we don’t know in advance what’s going to happen—and that gives life a constantly surprising, entertaining flavor. Writing a story shouldn’t be any different.
Instead, King believes the story reveals itself as he writes. He doesn’t force the action to move in a particular direction; the characters decide what to do, and he merely narrates what is happening as he observes it.
He analogizes writing like this to archaeology: The story already exists, buried in the dirt like a fossil. Your job is to unearth it delicately.
What does this mean, in practice? King typically starts his stories with a situation, then discovers how his characters work their way out of the situation.
Interesting situations typically start as “what if?”
From there, he lets the story develop without an ironfisted demand for what should happen. He usually doesn’t know how the story will end. Instead, he watches the characters work their way through the situation. The characters may surprise him with their ingenuity or complexity; King doesn’t know what they’re going to do until they do it.
Writing this way, without plot, helps in a few ways:
At the end of this section, King challenges you to write a 5-6 page story based purely on a situation he gives you, with no plot.
Write a story for this situation without plotting in advance.
After planting the seed of the situation, King then observes how his characters respond to the situation. He believes good stories center around the characters rather than the events.
At the start of writing, the characters start off as relative blank slates, then develop over time. Some grow only a little; some grow so much they start influencing the shape of the story.
When you create characters, you necessarily draw from real life. One major source is yourself—as a writer, you often ask yourself how you would behave in that situation. Another source is other people—the traits, habits, and behaviors you collect from the menagerie of people around you.
Bad characters are unidimensional—the “nice guy” or the “jilted lover” or the “evil scientist.” In reality, all of us see ourselves as the hero of our own films. Our actions are justified to ourselves, even if they seem ludicrous to other people. Portray the motivations and complexities of otherwise wooden characters, and the reader will find something to identify with.
As always, show, don’t tell. Your characters should behave in ways that illustrate their traits without your needing to narrate them.
Description provides sensory texture to the story, which draws the reader in viscerally. You’ll primarily describe the environment and the characters.
You don’t want too little or too much description.
Aim for the middle. Provide enough detail to seed the reader’s imagination, but not so much that you prevent the reader from filling in her own details.
Tips on writing description:
How not to write description:
Dialogue is what characters say. It defines who they are and what they’re like.
A common rule of writing is “show, don’t tell.” Instead of narrating what a character is like, show it through their speech. Through dialogue, a reader can tell if a character is witty or dull, transparent or sneaky, empathetic or cold.
The best dialogue sounds truthful—a reader believes that real people would talk that way. King includes a conversation from Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool:
The dialogue sounds credible, and without any other description or narration you can picture the people saying these words. Good dialogue sounds like you’re eavesdropping on a real conversation.
Wooden dialogue sounds forced and grates on the ear.
Writers vary in their ability to write good dialogue. Part of it depends on how writers interact with people. Writers who write the best dialogue like listening to other people, absorbing their rhythms, accents, and slang. Recluses often don’t know how real people talk and so find it hard to make their characters talk convincingly.
People might also just be born with or without an ear for dialogue, the way some musicians have perfect pitch. Some writers are accomplished in all other parts of writing except for dialogue, which makes King think recognizing good dialogue is somewhat inborn.
When you write truthful dialogue, you might use profanity or otherwise blacklisted words. King grew up in the lower middle class and portrays how colorfully they talk. You might get criticism from pearl-clutchers, but don’t be deterred—you should never violate the promise you make with the reader to tell the truth.
Beyond the three basic elements of narration, characters, and dialogue, the writing toolbox contains many more tools, ones you remember from English courses—themes, symbolism, alliteration, stream of consciousness, repetition, back story, and so on.
King’s advice on these tools is to make use of any tool that will enhance your story. Yet don’t go too far—remember that the point of the story is to tell a story, not to show how many words you can alliterate.
Often, you’ll see opportunities to add literary flourishes after completing your first draft. Patterns that you weren’t previously conscious of may now appear. Your revision is a chance to polish these.
King focuses on two devices in particular: symbols and themes. While you might have unsavory memories of expounding on both in your English essays, they’re both natural parts of storytelling and can be quite simple.
Symbolism is the use of an object or word to represent an idea other than its literal meaning. (Shortform note: For instance, the white color of the whale in Moby Dick is typically a symbol of beauty and virtue (as in Italian marble and weddings), but in nature the color white often belies a terrifying destructiveness (as in polar bears and great white sharks).)
Like other literary devices, symbols enrich the story. They also become a focusing device through the story, providing yet another opportunity for telepathy.
Again, adornments merely adorn; they are not the reason the story exists. Don’t premeditate your symbols before you write the story—it’ll feel artificial. Instead, discover the symbol as you unearth your story. As you write or revise, if you notice the symbol, then bring it out further and polish it, as though you were excavating a gem.
King comments on two of his books with symbols:
A literary theme is a central topic or message within the story. It’s the big picture—beyond the characters and story, what is your writing about? What message are you imparting; what question are you answering? King believes all good writing has a theme. A theme is also inspiring to the writer—it makes the work worthwhile, more meaningful.
Like symbols, themes focus the story. They make the story feel more unified and coherent.
As with all adornments, the theme should not be premeditated. Don’t start writing with the theme. Start with the story, and discover the theme as you go along. King suggests figuring out what the theme is while writing the first draft or shortly after it. Then, in your revision, bring out that theme further.
Themes often come from your personal interests, what you like musing about. King has his own, which become recurring themes in his works:
Knowing the theme can even help you with writer’s block by showing you how the story connects together. Some writers call this “thinking above the curve” or “the over-logic.”
We’ve now covered the three main elements of a story: narration, characters, and dialogue. You also now know to write a story by putting the characters in a situation and then observing how they work themselves out of the situation. This core work of storytelling will culminate in your first draft.
After your first draft comes revision, where you polish the story you’ve created. After several rounds, you’ll end up with the final draft. We’ll cover the overall stages of writing.
When you write your first draft, King suggests that you close your door. This is both literal and metaphorical. Literally, closing your door helps you focus and block out the outside world.
Metaphorically, write the first draft of your story just for you. By and large, don’t worry about what anyone else thinks. There is no outside world. The story belongs to you. (As we’ll cover soon, there’s one exception—your ideal reader.)
When you rewrite, you need to open your door. You’ll think about your readers and how to make at least some of them happy. You’ll take in feedback from people you trust and grapple with reconciling their feedback with your vision.
Here’s Stephen King’s writing process, from beginning to end.
Each person’s reaction to writing is naturally subjective, so you’ll get feedback along a wide spectrum, and you’ll get feedback you disagree with. Here’s how to work through the feedback.
Some writers struggle with incorporating feedback healthily. Changing your masterpiece simply because your readers didn’t like it feels like a corruption of art.
But if you feel this way, why invite readers you respect to review your draft at all? If it’s simply because you want adulation for what a genius you are, then at least be honest about what you’re looking for.
Think of reviewers as your own personal focus group to improve your writing. Movie studios do this with early cuts of their films. While it might seem arbitrary to shape an auteur’s vision to the tastes of a crowd pulled off the street, focus groups seem to work in actually making films more successful.
As we covered, King recommends putting at least six weeks between completing your first draft and starting your revision. The purpose is to get enough distance from your work that you no longer treat it as sacrosanct. Be willing to kill your darlings.
You’ll get feedback all along the spectrum, and you should weigh the feedback to see where it’s pointing.
If your reviewers are unanimous about one direction (whether something is great or terrible), they’re probably right.
Say there’s a tie—one person thinks Johnny is believable but Mary is ludicrous, and another thinks the opposite. Then the author wins. You shouldn’t feel compelled to change anything.
You shouldn’t weigh feedback from each person equally. It depends on how much you respect their opinion, and what area they’re particularly insightful about. Some people specialize in dialogue, others in character development, yet others in pacing, factual accuracy, and so on.
There is usually one person whose opinion you trust above all: the Ideal Reader. For King, it’s his wife Tabitha.
The Ideal Reader is the person you have in mind as you write. You come to know your Ideal Reader’s tastes so well you can predict how he or she will feel about any particular thing you’re writing. Will she laugh at this scene? Will she get bored here if I explain too much? The Ideal Reader helps give you an audience as you write and is perhaps the only exception to writing with the door closed.
The Ideal Reader should also be a honest reviewer—eternally supportive but unrelenting. You might disagree with Ideal Reader’s feedback, but you know there’s truth to it.
Especially if you start getting attention for your work, the Ideal Reader should remain unimpressed and be the objective eye bringing you back down to earth. Hitchcock’s wife
King sneaks glances at Tabitha as she reads, hoping the scenes he’s designed to score that great big laugh succeed. She’s chided him for being needy this way. He admits that writers really are needy, but he loves when she loves his work.
From these generalities, King moves onto two items that are particularly worth noting on revision: pace and back story.
Pace is how quickly you tell the story. (Shortform note: Pace increases with shorter scenes and frequent action. It decreases with description, narration, and introspection.)
The publishing world seems to believe that faster pace sells more books, given the minute attention span of modern audiences. King thinks this is hogwash, pointing to slow-paced books that still become bestsellers (to the shock of publishers).
Each story should have the pace it needs. Too fast and you might confuse or fatigue the reader. Too slow and the reader gets bored and might stop reading.
Tips on striking the right balance:
Back story is everything that happened before your story starts. For a character who’s 30 years old, the character’s entire life history can theoretically all be back story (as well as the life histories of every other character).
Like pace, you can have too little or too much back story. Too little and your character’s situation and motivations are unclear. Too much and you bore the reader.
Stick to the backstory that is relevant to your story. Everyone has a life history; most of it is not interesting. Leave out all the boring parts.
You can weave in back story in a more graceful way than straight narration. To show that a character is divorced, don’t have him say, “Hi there, ex-wife.” Talk about the fading tan line on his ring finger.
King personally dislikes in medias res, the starting of a story in the middle of the action with no back story. This requires flashbacks, which he finds clumsy. King prefers going in relatively straight chronology.
Research concerns the details that make a story sound realistic. While writing about a field you know nothing about—say, the judicial procedures of rural Kentucky—you will need to research.
Like back story, keep only the research that is relevant. The readers aren’t reading your story to learn the intricate details of what you researched. Like a spice in a recipe, the research is an adornment, not the meat.
There are some writers who seem to make their novels practically all about the research. Arthur Hailey wrote novels that seemed like parables for industry dissections—banking, airports, automobile manufacturing. While King still finds these novels to be solid, he suspects they appeal to readers who find fiction a guilty pleasure, and the guise of learning from a novel absolves them of guilt.
Now you know how to produce writing that tells the truth. How do you survive on this writing? King ends his advice with practicalities of getting an agent, getting published, and writing programs.
Novice writers think that getting an agent is their golden ticket to getting published. Complementary to this is the idea that getting an agent is difficult, and that publishing is just an exclusive old-boys’ club.
King thinks this is totally fiction. The writing world is always looking for the next bestselling author they can make money off of. These writers can come from anywhere, from the struggling single parent of J.K. Rowling to Frank McCourt, who was 66 when he published Angela’s Ashes. There is no secret club.
In turn, it’s not that hard to find an agent. But not all agents are good, and getting an agent is not a magic wand.
Here are tips on publishing and making your way in the business:
King is often asked whether writing classes, workshops, and seminars are worth it. (These are formal programs where writers dedicate time to write and critique each others’ work.) King has mixed-to-negative feelings.
Let’s start with the positives:
Despite these benefits, there’s plenty to dislike about organized writing programs.
Writing programs turn writing into an obligation. If you pay money to attend a writing program and force your day to revolve around it, writing becomes less of a spontaneous joy and more of a labor. In contrast, if you make time to write in everyday life, you’re more likely to feel that you’re doing it for joy.
The critiques tend to be useless. King’s experience is of writers sitting in a circle, nodding and smiling complacently, offering only inarticulate blandishments.
When you know you’ll get immediate critiques on your writing, you won’t be able to write with your door closed. You’ll constantly be thinking about answering to other people, perhaps with the previous night’s feedback still stinging. You’ll keep questioning yourself instead of writing for yourself.
Novice writers often see formal writing programs as a permission slip to write. You don’t need permission to write. No one needs to anoint you as a Writer for you to work. King wrote his early work as a teenager, then developed his craft while working in a commercial laundry.
Novice writers also often see writing programs as the secret sauce to getting their lucky break. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. The best way to learn to write is to read a lot and write a lot. You often learn the most important lessons all by yourself.