On Stephen King's "On Writing"

Love him or hate him, you must admit he's written a lot of books.

Hello friends,

I write to you from Pigeon Forge, Tennessee!

If you’ve never been here, this place is wild. So far I’ve climbed a ropes course, ridden a slide down the side of a mountain, visited a petting zoo on top of a different mountain, spent a day in Dollywood, and hiked through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:

Unfortunately, I have not made it to any of Pigeon Forge’s wacky dinner theaters. But believe it or not, this is actually my second time here, lmao. So I’ve actually been to Dolly Parton’s Stampede (formerly known as the, um, Dixie Stampede) before. It’s a trip.

Anyway, May has been a busy month, densely packed and rich in incident! So, instead of sourcing a new creative writing resource, I’m returning to an oldie but a goodie, a book you’ve quite possibly seen recommended before: Stephen King’s On Writing. (This resource also comes recommended by newsletter reader Veronika Groke!)

News & Upcoming

• On July 20, I’m teaching a free one-hour workshop on flash fiction forms. Register here.

• My horror-leaning Shakespearean sonnet, “Ophelia After Her Distress,” will be published in Shakespeare Unleashed in July 2023. (Soon!)

• My essay “Nostalgia, but Make It Stressful: Fantasy Game as Pressure Valve” will be published in the British Fantasy Society Journal’s Special Issue on Fantasy and Gaming in autumn 2023.

• My essay “‘You Have to Cook It In Your Own House’: One Family’s Pork and Sauerkraut Ritual” will be published in Heritage Local in 2023 or thereabouts.

• My essay “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette and Gender in Oops! A Manners Guide for Girls” will be published in An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi) in 2024 or thereabouts.

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Stephen King’s On Writing

Frankly, when I started this newsletter, I probably should have led with On Writing. (Not that I don’t stand by Algis Budrys’s pamphlet, lol.)

Partly this is because everyone’s obviously heard of Stephen King, but also because On Writing is a really foundational text. One of my first creative writing teachers recommended it to me ten years ago, and I’ve returned to it on probably at least an annual basis ever since.

When you first approach it, though, it’s not what you expect. Or at least, it’s not what I expected. Its full title is On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and the first section of it, covering about 1/3 of this relatively short book, is headed, “C.V.,” and it is, indeed, a memoir.

At first, it wasn’t clear to me what this memoir was doing in a book about how to write fiction. But King has elected to write about the moments from his life that made him into the writer he is. I can’t find the exact quote, but the writer Chuck Wendig (whose blog I must also talk about someday) has described the process of building a writing career as akin to charting a path up a treacherous mountain. The mountain face is constantly changing, with avalanches and rock slides and new animal dens and plant growth and erosion. Any path that someone else has taken to the top isn’t going to work for you, because the footholds they used aren’t there anymore. But, it’s still useful to see how other people have mapped that climb. That’s information you can use as you clamber your own way up.

The “C.V.” section of On Writing is one such map.

The middle third of the book is a fairly direct writing how-to, consisting of two sections, “Toolbox” and “On Writing.” The Toolbox runs very briefly through the basic, nuts-and-bolts (lol) tools that a person uses to write fiction: vocabulary, grammar, and certain elements of form and style, including paragraph length, sentence structure, and the use of passive verbs and adverbs (both of which King hates). Then, “On Writing” is about the construction of a writer’s life: the importance of reading, the relative myth of talent, various ways to make space and time for the page.

I love “On Writing” (the section, not the book as whole, though I love the book too). I love King’s straightforward style, and I love his faith that essentially anyone can do the thing. I will say that I think there are moments here where he is, however, unrealistic. For example, he says that when you’re writing a novel, you should write 1,000 words a day. Now, I happen to actually do this, and I think it does have the benefit of helping a person maintain momentum, but it’s a lot of words for someone who’s not practiced in the art of pushing words out of their brain! Stephen King knows exactly what he’s doing, but he’s also been doing it for so long that I’m not sure he remembers what it’s like not to know what he’s doing.

But. If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you could do worse than to emulate Stephen King for a while.

At the end of the book, we have “On Living: A Postscript,” on King’s return to writing after an apocalyptic car accident, and at the very very end – and to be honest, I think this alone is probably worth the price of admission – there are scans of a few pages from the start of the short story “1408.” These pages are shown first in their rough-draft form and then what they look like when marked up with edits, so that you can see how the editing process works.

Like I said, I return to this book over and over again. I ignore the Toolbox now; I have my own toolbox, all filled up. But I revisit, constantly, King’s tales of falling in love with his wife; selling Carrie; drinking, drinking more, and then drinking not at all, and meanwhile writing books like The Shining and The Tommyknockers and Misery. I actually really love On Writing, not only for its creative writing how-to, which is straightforward and readable and easy to implement, but for the ways in which it contributes to the Stephen King canon and provides a lens through which to perceive his work.

Here’s a quote, very far from the best quote in the book – I happen to think that’s the passage where King compares being at an intervention to standing on a the roof of a burning building and asking for two weeks to consider whether to grab the escape rope – but I think this quote, unlike that one, nails a key truth about writing:

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as “good” and other sorts as “bad,” is fearful behavior. Good writing is also about making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with.

To me, this is like the passage from The Jewel-Hinged Jaw that I quoted in my last newsletter, about the importance of using a combination of vision, analysis, and energy in order to write what you want with precision. Part of the act of developing that energy and vision is learning how to write without fear. And the cultivation of the skill of analysis involves learning how to use your toolbox. On Writing, I think, can help you with that.