With a career spanning nearly five decades, the king of horror, Stephen King shares some invaluable advice for budding writers.

Stephen King

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

One of the most prolific writers of our time, Stephen King is said to have authored about sixty-one novels and over two hundred short stories (it’s hard to keep track of the number considering the rate at which he churns out words), as well as several adaptations of his books into movies, television series and comics. As per the internet, he has sold over 350 million copies of his books, making him an unavoidable force to reckon with in the literary world.

King made his debut in 1974 with the release of Carrie that catapulted him into what would be an extremely fruitful career in writing. However, the journey to becoming one of the greatest horrors, crime and fantasy novel writers was not an easy one. His path to success was marred by alcoholism, drugs and acute financial instability, but even so, he persevered and went on to become an iconic figure in pop culture as the “King of Horror”.

In 2000, he released On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Part memoir and part masterclass that examines the intricacies of writing, King takes us through the various instances in his life that spurred his emergence as a writer. “I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will. The equipment comes with the original package. Yet it is by no means unusual equipment; I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened. If I didn’t believe that, writing a book like this would be a waste of time.”

Stephen King on Writing

Here are ten lessons on writing from the King of Horror…

1. How Ideas Come About
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognise them when they show up.”

2. Ward Off From Dressing Up Your Vocabulary
“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 ashamed of your short ones.”

“Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”

3. Read a Lot and Write a Lot
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

“I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s wat I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet, there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”

“If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time to write.”

4. What Good Writing Teaches Us
“Good writing teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling.”

“A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy—‘I’ll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand’—but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.”

5. Reading in Small Sips and Big Swallows
“Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. I take a book with me everywhere I go, and find there are all sorts of opportunities to dip in. The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as in long swallows.”

“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 ashamed of your short ones.”

“Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”

6. Stories are Relics Waiting to Be Excavated
“Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or GameBoys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or a thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”

7. Writing With the Door Closed
You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing, library carrels, park benches, and rented flats should be courts of last resort—Truman Capote said he did his best work in motel rooms, but he is an exception; most of us do our best in a place of our own until you get one, you’ll find your new resolution to write a lot hard to take seriously.”

“The space can be humble, and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk as well as talk the talk.”

8. Setting Your Writing Goal
“By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. As with physical exercises, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met.

9. Eliminating Distractions
“If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no T.V. or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shade unless it looks out at a bank wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it’s best to try and take care of them before you write.”

10. The Constant Reader
“There comes a point when you must judge what you’ve written and how well you wrote it. I don’t believe a story or a novel should be allowed outside the door of your study or writing room unless you feel confident that it’s reasonably reader-friendly. You can’t please all the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time.” 

“The reader must always be your main concern; without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void.”

Considering the number of books he has written, a question that King often gets asked, sometimes directly and at times in polite, indirect ways, is “Do you do it for the money, honey?” His response… “The answer is no. Don’t now and never did. Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it… I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side—I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

Published On: June 17th, 2021 / Categories: Blogs, Creators' Dialogue /