On Writing ~ Stephen King (6 of 24)

With 288 pages, he calls it a short book, yes for his standard it is. King's advice is grounded in the 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. 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.

With three forwards - the first starts with his joining the rock and roll band of writers - brainchild of Kathi Kamen Goldmark a book publicist and musician - a team of writers - Kathi, Amy, Ridley, Dave, Mitch Alborn and Stephen on rhythm guitar plus Josh Kelly and Erasmo - for music and companionship. It was Amy Tan Saying 'No one ever asks about the language' that motivated Stephen to write this book. 

The memoire comes first then the tips on writing. Upto point 11 here is from Part 1. 

Some advices to aspiring writers:

1. Read 'The Elements of Style' by William Strunk Jr and E.B. White,  - Rule 17 'Omit needless words'.
2. The editor is always right. 'To write is human, to edit divine.'
3. Writers cannot be made but only formed. Equipment's come with original package, those talents need to be strengthened and sharpened. - Ambition, desire, Luck too is needed. 
4. Imagining is the key for fiction
5. Good story ideas seem to come quite literally form nowhere, sailing from empty sky, two unrelated come together to make something new.
6. Every writer has been accused by someone or the other of their talent. 
7. Write with the doors closed, rewrite with the doors open - take out when you rewrite, things that are not the story. 
8. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.
9. Writers original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader's.
10. Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. 
11. Put your desk in the corner. Life is not a support system for art. It's the other way round. 
12. Writing is telepathy. 
13. You must not come lightly to a blank page. You can approach with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness or even despair. 
14. Have your own toolbox. - 
1. Common tools go on top, 
1. commonest of all is vocabulary. What you use is what matters, not how much you have. Use the first word that comes to you if it is appropriate and colourful. 
2. Grammar - avoid passive tense, Adverb is not your friend. 
2. Beneath it is:
1. Elements of style - 's
2. In fiction paragraph is less structured, it's best instead of the actual melody. paragraph not the sentence is the basic unit of writing. - words create sentences, sentences create paragraphs which quicken and begin to breathe. 
3. Right instruments
1. Read a lot and write a lot. - Good and Bad. 
2. How many books each author writes vary, some have written 100+, which Harper Lee had just one. Stephen wrote every morning or character being to stale off the mind. He wrote every day, except  including Christmas, 4th July and his birthday. He tells in interviews except so he don't sound workaholic.   He likes to write 10 pages a day, i.e. 2.000 words which is 180000 in 3 months. Have a daily writing goal. Keep no telephone around. 
3. Schedule time, rooms and space
4. Write about anything - as long as you are telling the truth. - Write what you know
5. Stylistic imitation is one thing, a perfectly honourable way to get started. - Imbue what you write with life and make it unique by blending  in your own personal knowledge.
15. Writers are in pyramid structure, the most are bad, few are genius. 
16. Healthy body and stable relationship helps. 
17. Stories and novels consist of three parts. Narrations, which move the story from point A to pint B and finally to point Z; description which creates a sensory reality for the reader and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech. Stephen distrust plot - he believes stores make themselves. The job of a writer is to give them a place to grow. They are like fossils in the ground. It is tough to get it out without a few breaks and losses. 
18.  Situation comes first, characters next, then narration, outcome is visualized but most of the time it is something unexpected. 
1. Exercise: take a story - change characters and incidents.
19.  Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Description begins in the writers imagination but should finish in the readers. 
20.  It is dialogue, that gives cast their voices and is crucial in defining their characters. You can say straight that a character did not do well in school, or may be by way of conversation.
21. With dialogue comes building character in fiction.  - pay attention to how real people around behave and tell the truth. If you do your job, your character will come to life and start doing stuff on their own. 
22. Practice is invaluable and honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity - without use of unnecessary adverbs.
23. When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done you have to step back and look at the forest. 
24. Starting with questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. 

 After Writing:

1. Two drafts and a polish for Stephen but he feels it will vary from writer to writer. - After the first drat before going again, take a break. Take your book rest like a bread dough between kneading. Resist temptations. Reading over the manuscript after a break, do it in one sitting. 
2. Be through the book over a dozen time or more before the print. Let 4 to 8 other people read before it goes to print. - Don't let all opinion weigh the same. 
3. Ideal reader is the best way for you to gauge whether or not your story is paced correctly and if you've handled the back story in satisfactory fashion. Pace is the speed at which your narrative unfolds. Most commercially successful books are fast paced. Stephen like slower pace and bigger, higher build. 
4. For Back story - everyone has a history, most of it isn't very interesting. Stick to the part that are.
5. Research where needed. 
6. Writers colony is interesting. 
7. How do you get an agent and how do you make contact with people in the world of publishing? - They are all looking for next hot writer. Send your published work details, and Thank them for reading. 

 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. 

Stephen King found inspiration to be a writer through H.P. Lovcraft’s collection of short stories that he found while going through old storage with his brother in the attic. When he read his father’s copy of The Lurker In The Shadows, he claimed to have found home. His first story was about four magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping out little kids. Their leader was a large white bunny named Mr. Rabbit Trick. Four stories on it. A quarter apiece. That was the first buck made. In late 1950s, a literary agent and compulsive science fiction memorabilia collector named Forrest J. Ackerman changed his life along with thousand other kids of his generation, editing a magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland. During his Ro-Man period, Stephen when 11 years,  first send his story to the magazine named spaceman. It was rejected, but Forry kept it and 20 years later, turned up at a Los Angeles bookstore with it turned up in line, and asked for signature. First published story was in a horror fanzine issued by Mike Garrett of Birmingham, Alabama. and published in his novella title 'In a Half-world of Terror'; Stephen's title was 'I was a Teenage Grave-robber'. Seeing green color on mothers tongue, while licking a stamp came the idea 'Happy Stamps'. This was rejected, he poked the rejection slip to a nil. 14 to 16, he poked rejection slips replacing the nail with a spike and went on writing. At 16, his brother had started Dave's rag. His brother was interested in all sort of scientific things and photography while Stephen was interested in movies. For them Poepictures where a genre of movie - the one that effected most being 'The pit and the Pendulum.' written by Richard Matheson. Once home, wrote it as a VIB Book, sold them in 1961 unaware of plagiarism and copyright. Teacher scolded and said, why do you write junk like this. This demotivated him, but he continued doing series for Dave's Rag. When in college and working in a mill part time, on his mother's advise to escape going for war, he wrote a story 'Graveyard shift', which paid him well and he felt rich.  He met his wife, Tabitha Spruce, at the University of Maine’s Folger library, and it continues, what ties them together are the words, the language and the work of life. His mother passed away in 1974, to uterine cancer. He spent some time teaching English Creative Writing at the University of Maine in the late 70s, early 80s.

 "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.

The first half of the book on the early experiences of the author that shaped the writer in him and the second half on writing, he is a true teacher. 

A few quotes from the book that highly resonated the writer in me -

"Hard writing makes for easy reading"

"You don't need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing"

"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"

The certain reason I write- "writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well."

If Stephen Kind would meet George Orwell after life -  he would want to ask if the story idea had come first and then the theme?  According to Stephen, Story idea comes first. He feels allegories like Animal Farm could be an exception. 

Stephen King's son Owen King started with recording audio books for his dad when he was 10 years old first on cassette in 1987 his book 'The thorn Birds' and then Watchers....

The book ends with a conversation between Joe Hill and Stephen King on the book 'The Institute' and other books. He has more than 203 books to his credit.  Stephen and Joe wrote a story together called 'Throttle'. 

For Stephen - Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury were a big deal particularly the stories. 

Movies watched most are - Sorcerer, William Friedkin. Followed by The Exorcist. Go ahead. 

Joe Hill's favourate horror move of all time was : It: Chapter one. According to him, Politicians sold fear, but his father sold bravery. The stories taught that if you have some faith and a sense of humor, and if you're loyal to your loved ones, somtimes you can kick the darkness until it bleeds daylight.