What Stephen King Taught Me About Writing

2023-10-31

After more than ten years of blogging, writing is still something I have to learn by doing. I write almost every day and still get stuck. Choosing a subject and taking it somewhere on the page does come more easily than it used to.

A book I found early on

I found one of the first books that helped me when my blog was still new and I was trying to figure out what a writer actually does.

Finding On Writing

I started a blog on Tistory in 2008 and quickly ran into two problems. I did not know what to write about, and once I chose a subject, I did not know how to put it into words.

It was a bold move for someone who rarely wrote. The confidence that got me as far as opening the blog could only carry me so far. I went looking for books about how to do the work.

That was how I found Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

The craft behind the memoir

King tells the story of how he learned to write alongside what he has learned about the craft. His life gives the advice its weight. You can see where the habits came from and why he still relies on them.

He gets down to useful particulars, too. He talks about vocabulary and grammar, how paragraphs work and how a story can begin with a situation you want to follow.

Here are a few of the practical ideas I carried away from it, in my own words.

  1. Reach for an active verb.
  2. Remember what the reader needs from a sentence.
  3. Be sparing with adverbs.
  4. In dialogue, an ordinary “said” usually does the job.
  5. King favors adding ’s to form the possessive of a singular name, even when it ends in s.
  6. Put the words that need the most weight near the end of the sentence.

Revision begins with cutting

After the first draft, there is the business of reading what you actually wrote. I have often skipped that step because I was short on time, which may say something about the kind of writer I still am.

King recommends cutting roughly a tenth of the first draft. I recognize the value of that advice every time I go back to a piece and find a sentence that explains what the reader already knows.

Time is still the excuse I reach for first. Some posts have gone up before I have even checked the spelling. I could do more for those pieces just by giving them one more read.

Can a competent writer become a good one?

King sketches four rough levels of writing ability.

  1. Poor
  2. Competent
  3. Good
  4. Great

He draws some hard lines between them. The opening he leaves is the one that stuck with me: a competent writer can become a good one through work.

That sounds like a modest promise. It is also one a person can do something with, from one draft to the next.

I recognize the gap he is describing. I have learned to do things I once struggled with. Becoming a truly great writer feels like a different order of achievement.

I wonder where I would put myself. I know how rough those first posts were. Can I call myself competent now? Have I made it any further? After all those years of blogging, the question still gives me something to work on tomorrow.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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