On Writing by Stephen King
Before I start, let me say that I am not a King fan, though I appreciate him as an author. King is someone who gets away with boring plots because he has a deep intuitive understanding of human psychology. I admire his ability to convey complex concepts without talking about them explicitly. For example, he can remind you how you saw the world as a child, when there was fun and adventure to be found in small things, but the dark space under your bed held untold terrors.
I was drawn to this book by King's power to convey glimpses into complex and often twisted perceptions of the world. If you are hoping to gain insights into this part of his writing, the book may be a disappointment, or not, depending on how you approach it. If you are looking for straight-forward instructions on how to weave the King-magic, you won't find them here. It is quite clear that King himself doesn't know how he does it. Instead he demonstrates this King-magic by giving us this deep connection to himself, Stephen King, the author. We get a good look at the events that shaped him as a writer and the way he is working today, which makes this a worthwhile read.
The book starts biographical, describing King's childhood and his attempts to start a school newspaper. Poverty and the things it makes us do are a constant presence in the first half of the book and it emerges as a major force that shapes King's thinking. Between the lines it is evident that this early trauma opened his eyes to the way in which a pressing need can redefine moral categories, a theme that runs through many of his best works. You can't help but cheer for King when he finally pulls himself out of his misery, makes it to university and celebrates his first success with Carrie, after his wife Tabea rescues the manuscript from the bin. King doesn't hide his periods of drug addiction and his eventual recovery, nor what it did to him as a writer.
Halfway through the book King suddenly remembers that he is supposed to give writing advice and immediately he is struggling. He offers some very shallow advice, such as fixing your typos (not making this up) and shares insights about the publishing industry that seem woefully outdated. This is also the part where his personal nemesis comes up: the adjective. If you know one thing about King's writing, you probably know that he is a fervent hater of adjectives (and adverbs). Yes, his books still use adjectives, but never lightly and never needlessly. What King is opposed to is the purple prose where nights are always dark and stormy, blood shines crimson, and each alleyway is foreboding. He hates those cheap and often redundant adjectives that act as a bubblewrap of needless words, blunting all edges of the narration. King loves these edges. He likes to write how things are without the veneer of adjectives to paint matters in pretty colors, lending gritty realness to his voice.
He also dives into some deeper principles that guide his writing. Again, immediately he struggles putting these principles into words. In these sections you can tell he is not a plotter who has sorted out his method of working. Instead you see a man who has gained amazing skills through long practice, and is wondering how he does what he does. In this situation he resorts to metaphors and you have to start reading between the lines. The one that stuck with me most is the heavy toolkit that his uncle used to carry around. This is what writing skills are to King: A big box full of isolated experiences and skills that act as individual tools to solve specific problems, such as how to describe a scene, how to introduce a character, etc.
King goes on to share how he writes his books, which starts with the setup of his desk and the different phases of writing and revision each manuscript goes through. There is a lot of useful advice here and for many readers this will be the most valuable part of the book. I have put my own take on this, which was partially shaped by King, into a help page, here.
Finally there is another big twist waiting in the last pages, where King tells us about events that happened during the writing of On Writing. In these final pages another person shows up, which King describes as someone who could have been a character in one of his books, but this is not a spectre that rose from one of King's novels but the exact opposite: a biological person who is now immortalized in King's writing. Nevertheless I had to smile a little when I read that King thinks of this person as a typical Stephen-King character come to life. There is one other character in On Writing about which the same could be said: The author himself, Stephen King, with all his flaws, addictions and struggles, seems like a character from a Stephen-King novel, and this is perhaps the true secret of his success, the age-old advice: write what you know. King's books are fascinating because they give us a glimpse into a world he lives in--something every writer should do.
7/8
