- Ed King On Writing Sweet Home Alabama
- Stephen King On Writing Review
- King On Writing
- Stephen King On Writing Excerpt
“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”
By Maria Popova
“Employ a simple and straightforward style,”Mark Twain instructed in the 18th of his 18 famous literary admonitions. And what greater enemy of simplicity and straightforwardness than the adverb? Or so argues Stephen King in On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft (public library), one of 9 essential books to help you write better.
- 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.
- “Long live the King” hailed Entertainment Weekly upon publication of Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part master class by one of the best-selling authors of all time, this superb volume is a revealing and practical view of the writer’s craft, comprising the basic tools of the trade every writer must have.
While he may have used a handful of well-placed adverbs in his excellent recent case for gun control, King embarks upon a forceful crusade against this malignant part of speech:
The adverb is not your friend.
Adverbs … are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. … With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me … but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came beforeHe closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?
Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day . . . fifty the day after that . . . and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s — GASP!! — too late.
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. Lily King Lily King’s novels include The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, and Father of the Rain. Her most recent, Euphoria, has won numerous awards and was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review, is being translated into numerous languages, and will be a feature film.
I can be a good sport about adverbs, though. Yes I can. With one exception: dialogue attribution. I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions . . . and not even then, if you can avoid it. Just to make sure we all know what we’re talking about, examine these three sentences:
‘Put it down!’ she shouted.
‘Give it back,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s mine.’
‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said.
In these sentences, shouted, pleaded, and said are verbs of dialogue attribution. Now look at these dubious revisions:
‘Put it down! Stream video recorder for mac. she shouted menacingly.
‘Give it back,’ he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’
‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll,’ Utterson said contemptuously.
The three latter sentences are all weaker than the three former ones, and most readers will see why immediately.
King uses the admonition against adverbs as a springboard for a wider lens on good and bad writing, exploring the interplay of fear, timidity, and affectation:
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.
[…]
Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as ‘good’ and other sorts as ‘bad,’ is fearful behavior.
This latter part, touching on the contrast between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, illustrates the critical difference between working for prestige and working for purpose.
Complement On Writing with more famous wisdom on the craft from Kurt Vonnegut, Susan Sontag, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. P. Lovecraft, Zadie Smith, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, Mary Karr, Isabel Allende, and Susan Orlean.
One of the best books I’ve read about writing and being a writer is Stephen King’s On Writing. Written whilst he was recovering from a horrific accident (a van driver hit him while he was out for a walk), it’s a fascinating book combining autobiography and advice. If you’ve not heard of Stephen King, he’s a very well-known American horror writer – you may have seen films such as Carrie and The Dead Zone based on his books.
The first part of On Writing is headed “CV”, and is an autobiographical account of King’s childhood and development as a writer. Loosely chronological, it’s structured in a series of short chapters or segments, each headed with a number and each dealing with a single point or topic in King’s life.
Ed King On Writing Sweet Home Alabama
It’s a fascinating insight into the makings of a famous author – not only an entertaining read but one with a lot to teach writers about persistence and working towards your dreams. King started sending out short stories to magazines and publications when he was very young:
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 kept on writing.
King writes about his early attempts at self-publication (helping his elder brother Dave write and print a newspaper, Dave’s Rag, then writing a novelisation of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum and selling it to school friends.)
After “CV” there is a short section entitled “Toolbox” where King segues from a story about his Uncle Oren’s toolbox into a discussion of what the writer needs in his/her own “toolbox” of writing. This includes vocabulary and grammar as the basics on the top layer (hang around at Daily Writing Tips a while and you’ll pick up plenty of help with these!) with style coming on the second layer.
The third section of the book, “On Writing”, deals with what King calls the third layer of the toolbox – everything that goes into writing good fiction. He tells us:
What follows is everything I know about how to write good fiction. I’ll be as brief as possible, because your time is valuable and so is mine, and we both understand that the hours we spend talking about writing is time we don’t spend actually doing it. I’ll be as encouraging as possible, because it’s my nature and because I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well – settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on.
This part of the book is hugely entertaining (King is very easy to read, and writes like a friendly mentor chatting to you over a beer), and absolutely packed with invaluable advice. Two of the key points King makes are:
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
King strongly believes in setting writing goals, and recommends a minimum of a thousand words a day, six days a week. I tried following his advice (whilst working a full-time office job) and didn’t last long – you might prefer to set your own goal at five hundred words a day or even two hundred. Since King himself says he writes 2,000 words a day whilst working on a book, I suspect his advice is aimed at those aiming to make fiction writing their career (especially given his advice to read for four-six hours a day as well!) Yota access for mac os.
Java for mac os download. King gives great advice on how to choose what genre to write in (one you read, and love), and how to create a “situation” for your story and write good description and dialogue. He goes into useful detail about what to look for when revising your work – does the story hang together, are the scenes paced well, are there factual errors? He includes an example of his own draft work and explains the edits he made to it.
As King says:
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.
On Writing is an encouraging but very honest look at what it means to be a fiction writer, and if you’re an aspiring author – especially if you secretly worry about not being “clever” enough or educated enough to write fiction – then I highly recommend it.
Stephen King On Writing Review
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King On Writing
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Stephen King On Writing Excerpt
