On Writing
 | By Stephen King Pocket, 2002, Mass Market Paperback Customer Rating: 819 reviews Recommend |
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"Long live the King" hailed Entertainment Weekly upon the publication of Stephen King's On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the bestselling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer's craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have. King's advice is grounded in his vivid memories from childhood through his emergence as a writer, from his struggling early career to his widely reported near-fatal accident in 1999 — and how the inextricable link between writing and living spurred his recovery. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower and entertain everyone who reads it — fans, writers, and anyone who loves a great story well told.
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. — Tim Appelo
Title: On Writing
Sales Rank: 1254 in Books
Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Pocket, 2002-07-01, Mass Market Paperback, 320 pages, ISBN: 0743455967
Package Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 0.9 inches, 0.3 pounds
- Don't wait for the muse...show up every day
- I don't even read Stephen King books. I don't like horror books as I have nightmares - but I know Stephen is a writing legend so this book was fantastic to read.
He writes in that "real person" way that makes you feel he is not some writing super-hero that just creates a bestseller out of nothing. He is to the point in his advice, but behind it is his… More reviews
- really good stuff
- I'm not even a fan of Stephen King. I've seen plenty
of movies made from his books and most of them were
bad or stupid or both.
I have read a handful of fiction books the guy wrote.
He's easy to read - he hashes out these very human
characters well and puts them in these… More reviews
- Impassioned instruction from the King of horror
- King's passion for writing is absolute and he imparts his passion to the reader. That alone is a good enough reason to read On Writing, but this book is unexpectedly engaging and informative at every turn. More reviews
- On Writing by Stephen King
- This work is phenomenal. I was only interested in the craft of writing and had never read Stephen King before. Though the work is supposed to be a manual for better writing, it reads like a thrilling novel. What a surprise.
I never imagined discussions of drafts, agents, editing, grammar, etc. could be woven together with King's biography to produce an astounding, readable text… More reviews
- Great Resource
- Inspirational and funny. He talks about writing then goes oh by the way here's a great little tip. At first I barely noticed them. He shows what's important to him as a writer and reader as well as tells you. But even when he's telling you it's like we're having a cup of coffee together. Since its the writing rather than the subject of his… More reviews
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