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On Writing | 
 enlarge | Author: Stephen King
Publisher: Scribner
Category: EBooks
List Price: $7.99
Buy New: $6.39
You Save: $1.60 (20%)
Rating:  821 reviews
Sales Rank: 430
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
ASIN: B000FC0SIM
Publication Date: January 7, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
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
Product Description
"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft -- and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever. Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so revealing. On Writing begins with a mesmerizing account of King's childhood and his uncannily early focus on writing to tell a story. A series of vivid memories from adolescence, college, and the struggling years that led up to his first novel, Carrie, will afford readers a fresh and often very funny perspective on the formation of a writer. King next turns to the basic tools of his trade -- how to sharpen and multiply them through use, and how the writer must always have them close at hand. He takes the reader through crucial aspects of the writer's art and life, offering practical and inspiring advice on everything from plot and character development to work habits and rejection. Serialized in The New Yorker to vivid acclaim, On Writing culminates with a profoundly moving account of how King's overwhelming need to write spurred him toward recovery, and brought him back to his life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 816 more reviews...
 Instructional, beautiful, invaluable. December 5, 2008
I've been away from writing for many years and thought I'd start with King's book to get me back into the swing of things. It worked. (I may not be writing to publish, but I am writing--and that's always the first hard step.)
King includes myriad practical tips and techniques for buckling down, staying focused, and pay attention to what's important. King's use of his own experiences as examples of what to do--and what not to do--make the work both personal and moving. His candor is refreshing and his delivery is effortless.
There are two (related) areas I wish he would have addressed in much more detail, since his focus is on the language of writing: cadence and word order.
Stephen, if you're out there, why is cadence so important, and what characteristics determine how it affects the reader?
And why does the title of my review ("Instructional, beautiful, invaluable") have a different effect than, say, "Beautiful, instructional, invaluable?" Is it just that we interpret order to be an indication of priority?
But beyond these two narrow areas, King's work is a one-of-a-kind treasure that I will return to time and time again for help and for moral support.
Another Side of Stephen King November 22, 2008
In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Stephen King says that we must come to writing in almost any way but lightly. We may be angry or exhuberant or jealous or anguished. I repeat, as does he, we must come to the craft any way but lightly. This is a side of Stephen King I have neve seen before, and I like it. The book is a wonderful guide to the art, to the craft of writing. My book is new, but is already earmarked and looks worn with age, as all great books should. All true devotees to the craft of writing, all who know that the demands of writing are great, should own this book. It is a revelation.
Don't wait for the muse...show up every day October 29, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 story. How he and Tammy came from nothing, how his drug use crushed him, and how his accident changed the way he sees the world. He knows the power of story.
Some top pieces of advice from the book:
- Close your door and make a serious commitment to write. Don't wait for the muse to come. Show up every day and "sooner or later, he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic"
- Write what you love to read. Don't write in a genre to make money.
- If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write.
- He writes by finding some characters and then putting them in a situation. They often surprise him by what happens.
- Write your first full draft with no input. Then let it rest for 6 weeks or so "like bread dough between kneadings". You will find it much easier to kill your darlings after a rest
- Revise for length. 2nd draft = 1st draft - 10%
- "Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word "Writer" on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not."
Great book!
 really good stuff October 21, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 unusual, frightening
situations - often no-wins. You probably know that.
It's easy to overlook that King, the champion schlockmeister,
is a consumate communicator. His writing is empathic - which
is what keeps us curious and involved in the stories.
Honestly - I don't like slasher movies. Maybe King doesn't
write them but in my little brain he is inextricably tied
to the genre that scared the pants off me as a kid -
Friday the 13th, et. al.
The funny thing is that King's fiction is surprisingly
complex, rich in character and local color. When
put on the screen it is generally dull and seems formulaic -
but that is perhaps more because King's writing has
influenced all scary movies of the last 30 years.
I'm an admirer now. I'm taking writing a lot more seriously
now than I have in the last 15 years. I still think
the themes and plots of many of King's novels don't
interest me - but after reading this there are a half-dozen
or so I may track-down and read.... particularly:
-The Stand
-The Tommyknocker's (apparently derivative of 5 Million Years To Earth - which
is close to the best Sci-fi film ever, IMO, and ripped-off also in the Space
Vampires movie "LifeForce")
Oh yeah. The writing stuff. Cogent. To the point. How
to simplify and amplify the power of your story. He tells
how to defeat the Passive Voice habit, how to recover
from adverb abuse, etc... basically how to get the bad
habits out of the way so the competent writer can progress
towards becoming a good one.
Impassioned instruction from the King of horror October 19, 2008
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.
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