On Writing

On Writing details Stephen King’s journey to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time while delivering hard-won advice on the craft to aspiring writers.

Stephen King’s journey is one of stubborn perseverance. Where he did get lucky was that his mother encouraged him to start writing at just six years old. She told him his first original story was good enough to be in a book, and she also paid him his first dollar for the next four ones he wrote. The early praise and earnings were pivotal in his life — but they were also the only ones he received.

For the next ten years, King hardly received positive feedback. He received blunt rejection notes on his story submissions to magazines, like “No” or “Not good enough.” To not lose his enthusiasm, King treated rejection like a game. He fixed a nail to his wall, then pinned each next rejection slip onto it, like receipts collected at a restaurant.

Each next rejection meant he was still in the game. It was an invitation to keep playing. Eventually, he racked up so many, his nail fell off the wall. He attached a bigger one and kept going. Over time, the rejections got milder. Kinder. People started giving him useful feedback, such as to use paper clips, not staples, to bind manuscripts. Lesson by lesson, he kept improving.

It was only when he was 16 that he first heard the words, “This isn’t for us, but it’s good. You have talent. Try again.” And try again he did, until, only in 1974, after 20 years of writing, he had his big breakthrough when the publishing rights to Carrie sold for $400,000.

As a budding writer, some of the easiest lessons to follow are the things you’re not supposed to do. Whatever you try might fail, but what you can avoid entirely helps a great deal. Two of King’s biggest pet peeves are adverbs and passive tense. Both weaken your writing and ultimately reveal a lack of confidence. “Bertha timidly admitted she had eaten the candy.” The word “timidly” takes our focus away from the action. It should be clear from what we wrote before that Bertha feels guilty about eating the candy. “After shuffling her feet for a good 30 seconds, Bertha admitted she had eaten the candy.” That’s a much more vivid picture, and that’s why adverbs are often just a way of weaseling out of properly explaining what’s going on. Similarly, “The football was thrown by Francis as hard as he could” puts the focus on the football — an object that doesn’t actually do anything. It sounds clunky and makes us wonder what’s going on. Have…