A writer on writing

I love buying biographies of writers or their autobiographies and enjoy reading about their lives. While these books reveal quite a bit about the writers' psyche and what drives them to write, the books don't of course delve into the mechanics of writing. In other words, how they write. For this, one will need to get books by writers specifically on writing - and I have two of these on my shelf.

One is Stephen King's On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft (click on this link for a comprehensive review and summary). I have to admit that I haven't read any of his books but he is a prolific writer and a successful one at that, with more than thirty international bestsellers. As such, even if his genre is not my cup of tea, it doesn't mean that I can't learn from him.

In this book, King writes as if he's talking to the reader. He is rather modest in his First Foreword (there are three, albeit short ones), asking himself, "Why did I want to write about writing? What made me think I had anything worth saying?" And then he gives his answer, "... someone who has sold as many books of fiction as I have must have something worthwhile to say about writing it, but the easy answer isn't always the truth. Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I'm not sure anyone wants to know how he made it." Nonetheless, he asserts that he does "care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper. What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it's done." 

Raised by his single-parent mother, after his father deserted the family when King was just two years old and his brother four, he led a rather disjointed life. He had a lively imagination as a child and loved to write from a young age. When he was thirteen, he sent a story to a science fiction magazine but it was rejected. The first story that was published, I Was a Teenage Grave-robber, appeared in a horror fanzine. But this didn't happen too often then. He says, "By the time I was fourteen... the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. By the time I was sixteen I'd begun to get rejection slips with handwritten notes a little more encouraging than the advice to stop using staples and start using paperclips." Yes, King's book is rather humorous, making it an easy and fast read.

The first part of the book is autobiographical but it gives us an idea of King's love for writing from a young age. He even edited his high school newsletter and produced his own four-sheet The Village Vomit. As the latter contained fictional, but not necessarily kind, stories about the faculty, it got him into trouble. The upside was that it led to the counselor getting him a stint with the town's weekly newspaper "to turn 'my restless pen' into more constructive channels." This was where he learnt his first lesson from the paper's editor: "When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story." It wasn't an easy road to success but he persevered. 

In the second part, King explores what writing is and he begins with this: "It's writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. It you can take it seriously, we can do business. It you can't or won't. it's time for you to close the book and do something else." He then shares his 'toolbox' with the reader. 

The most important tool is vocabulary - "the bread of writing". You shouldn't, he advises, be "looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes... Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you'll never use 'emolument' when you mean 'tip'." The next important one is grammar: "One either absorbs the grammatical principles of one's native language in conversation and reading or one does not... if you don't know, it's too late. And those incapable of grasping grammar... will have little or no use for a book like this, anyway." After that come elements of style (he cites Strunk and White's book, about which I have posted on this blog, many times). These tools must be mastered for good writing. 

According to King, "while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one." How? "... read a lot and write a lot", he says. "There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut." He goes on, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." 

Then there is the actual writing. It's good to be disciplined about this. King works to a schedule: "Mornings belong to whatever is new - the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time." And he writes every day if he's on a project, feeling that if he doesn't, "the characters begin to stale off in my mind... the tale's narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story's plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade." He is driven to write, saying that "for me, not working is the real work." 

He sets an objective when he writes: "I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh... only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words." 

It's also important to the writing process to have a definite place to write. "Until you get one," King asserts, "you'll find your new resolution to write a lot hard to take seriously... The space can be humble... and it 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... If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there's a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall." 

King's other nuggets of advice:

• Write what you like,  then imbue it with life and make it unique. 
• Don't be too worked up about the story's plot because that can take away spontaneity.
• The situation comes first and the characters come after that. Let the characters do things their way.
• Good description is essential but it's a learned skill that comes from reading and writing a lot.
• Don't over-describe: "Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's... locale and texture are much more important to the reader's sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players."
• Well-crafted dialogue is crucial in defining characters and the key to writing good dialogue is honesty about the words coming out of the characters' mouths. 
• Characters shouldn't be one-dimensional.

As he gives out his advice, King draws upon his own works and that of others as examples. Towards the end of the book, he points out that "writing isn't about making money, getting famous... it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your book, and enriching your own life, as well."