Stephen King’s Advice For Aspiring Writers
He wrote 60 novels from these simple daily habits.
I recently finished Stephen king book on writing.
Stephen king is known for writing at least over 60 novels and more than hundred short stories. Many of them have been adapted into movies. I think last time I saw were 48 in IMDb, isn’t that crazy?
Someone that has written that much will know a thing or two about the craft. While I encourage you to read the book because is very entertaining and didactic, I wanted to highlight the things he considers that you need to do to become a professional writer, plus other more technical advice about writing style and editing.
Read A Lot And Write A Lot
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
Like any other artistic discipline your creativity is shaped by the things you consume. And nothing can make you a better writer than reading as many books as you can.
“We read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. We read in order to experience different styles.”
Every new book will teach you something new: the good books will teach you the things you enjoy reading and want to imitate, and the bad ones will teach you the things you want to avoid in your own prose.
You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so.
I read because I enjoy reading, and I try to have a book with me at all time. Any waiting period is never wasted if is accompanied with a great story. In the same way when I have some free time or before going to sleep I usually read between 1 and 2 hours. Every page counts, I realized that I could read at least 10-15 hours a week, which makes a non-fiction book per week or if is a long novel maybe I can read it in 14 days.
Find you reading rhythm and try to enjoy it. Now I can’t imagine myself without reading at least a couple hours per day. And if reading is not your thing maybe writing is also not for you.
Daily Goal
You can read anywhere, almost, but when it comes to writing, King’s advice is to have your own space.
Find your sacred space, a place where you can sit and disconnect from the rest of the world. A place where shutting the door tells the world that you mean business.
”The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand.”
By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. I suggest a thousand words a day with one day off a week.
With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met. Then get busy putting those thousand words on the page.
Every novel ever written has been written the same way he says: ”One word at a time.”
“Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like The Lord of the Rings, the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”
Writing Style
He starts the book by explaining what is essentially writing:
“Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer’s head and then leaps to the reader’s.”
“Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float.”
If you ever feel lost in the tangles of rhetorics, remember, you can always fall back to the simplicity of the noun-verb sentence construction. It provides a safe path that you can follow to put your thoughts down.
Passive Voice
“Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen.”
”You should avoid the passive tense.”
Passive sentence feel safe because the subject waits to receive the action. Is a construction for timid and lazy writers.
Then King writes this hilarious passage to illustrate this:
“Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It’s dead, for Christ’s sake!”
Active verbs are more visual and clear, you know exactly WHO is doing WHAT. And that’s what you need when you write.
Avoid Adverbs
Adverbs are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly.
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. 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 before He 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?”
I am not against all adverbs, in fact some of them will be useful to convey some degree of credibility or some extra necessary information—look at me using credibility, in this case worked because added some extra nuance. The problem comes, like King said, when you can express the same idea with other better words. Most of the time adverbs become redundant and weakens the message you want to transmit.
The Two-Draft System
King’s always advice to write the first draft with the door closed meaning for yourself. Get the story on the page, don’t shut your creative flows thinking about anyone else. The first draft is for yourself, to get all the ideas out. You are telling yourself the story, that’s what the first draft is about. Doesn’t matter if it makes sense or if the sentences are sloppy. That’s what the second draft is for.
The second draft is with the door open, you polish what you wrote thinking about the reader’s experience. Remove any unnecessary parts that are not interesting, slow, or don’t add anything to the story. Rewrite clunky phrases, fix the grammar and reorganize sections if needed.
He gives this formula that once he received from an editor when we was trying to publish short-stories on newspapers and magazines:
”Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”