Stephen King Dishes it Out!!!

Horror, fantasy and science fiction author who wrote the best-sellers Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cujo, Christine, and The Dead Zone among numerous others. Every one of the titles just mentioned was also successfully portrayed on the big screen. I remember when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I became so engrossed in The Shining that one day at the urging of my stepmother, my father literally pried that novel out of my hands and confiscated it because they thought the book’s mature contents was having an unhealthy influence on my mind. Maybe they were right. However, I hereby state for the record, that I have never axed anyone to death, yet. All of the following gems have been taken from ‘On Writing-A Memoir of the Craft.’, ISBN: 0-671-02425-6. Also, for some reason (maybe simply because she’s an Asian American just like me), I found it interesting and felt compelled to mention here that Stephen King dedicated this book to Amy Tan (author of The Joy Luck Club).

“This is a short book because most books about writing are bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit. Once notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style.” Pg. 11

“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” Pg. 37

“Don’t staple manuscripts,” the postscript read. Loose pages plus paperclip equal correct way to submit copy.” This was pretty cold advice, I thought, but useful in its way. I have never stapled a manuscript since.” Pg. 40

“From a financial point of view, two kids were probably too many for college grads working in a laundry and the second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. The only edge we had came courtesy of magazines like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank-what my Uncle Oren used to call the “ the titty books.” By 1972 they were showing quite a lot more than bare breasts and fiction was on its way out, but I was lucky enough to ride the last wave. I wrote after work; when we lived on Grove Street, which was close to the New Franklin, I would sometimes write a little on my lunch hour, too. I suppose that sounds almost impossibly Abe Lincoln, but it was no big deal-I was having fun. Those stories, grim as some of them were, served as brief escapes from the boss, Mr. Brooks, and Harry the floor-man.” Pg. 69 (On the early, struggling years)

“My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hamden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.” Pg. 74

“I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away. I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl female cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn’t much help in getting there. For me writing has always seemed best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I was wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off. Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn’t pay off unless it was pretty long." Pg. 76

“To tell you the truth, Carrie (the novel) had fallen off my radar screen almost completely. The kids were a handful, both the ones at school and the ones at home, and I had begun to worry about my mother. She was sixty-one, still working at Pineland Training Center and as funny as ever, but Dave said she didn’t feel very well a lot of the time. Her bedside table was covered with prescription painkillers, and he was afraid there might be something seriously wrong with her. ‘She always smoked liked a chimney, you know,’ Dave said. One Sunday not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson at Doubleday. I was alone in the apartment; Tabby had packed the kids off to her mother’s for a visit, and I was working on the new book, which I thought of as ‘Vampires in Our Town. ‘Are you sitting down?’ Bill asked. ‘No,’ I said. Our phone hung on the kitchen wall, and I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. ‘Do I need to?’ ‘You might,’ he said. ‘The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars.’ I hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least. ‘Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?’ ‘Four hundred thousand dollars,’ he said. ‘Under the rules of the road’-meaning the contract I’d signed-‘two hundred thousand K of it’s yours. Congratulations, Steve.’ I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was just telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of wooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked Bill. He said he was. I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros. ‘After that a decimal point and two more zeros,’ he added. We talked for another half an hour, but I don’t remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother’s. Her youngest sister, Marcella, and Tab had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment in my stocking feet, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over. At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor’s Main Street was LaVerdiere’s Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother’s Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here’s one of life’s true facts: there’s nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere’s. I did the best I could. I got her a hair dryer. When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hair dryer. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. ‘What’s this for?’ she asked. I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.” Pg. 85-87

“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, 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. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use ‘emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’ and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean ‘John stopped long enough to take a shit.’ I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word-of course you will, there’s always another word-but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.” Pg. 118

‘The timid fellow writes ‘The meeting will be held at seven o’clock’ because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know.’ Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put the meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.” There, by God! Don’t you feel better?” Pg. 123

“Two pages of the passive voice-just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction-make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous as well. How about this: ‘My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was began.’ Oh, man-who farted, right?’ Pg. 123

“THE ADVERB IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They are the only ones that end in –ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seemed to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. 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 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 the context? What about 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? Someone out there is now accusing me of being 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.” Pg. 124-125

“The best forms of dialogue attribution is ‘said’ as in ‘he said’, ‘she said’, ‘Bill said’, Monica said’. If you want to see this put stringently into practice, I urge you to read or reread a novel by Larry McMurty, the Shane of dialogue attribution. That looks damn snide on page, but I’m speaking with complete sincerity. McMurty has allowed few adverbial dandelions to grow on his lawn. He believes in the he-said/she-said even in moments of emotional crisis (and in Larry McMurty novels there are a lot of those). Go and do likewise.” Pg. 127

“While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”
Pg. 128

“I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry but there are lots of bad writers. Some are on staff at your local newspaper, usually reviewing little-theater productions or pontificating about the local sports teams. Pg. 141

“Let me repeat my basic premise: if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one, or even a competent one. If　you’re good and want to be great…fuhgeddaboutit.” Pg. 144

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’ s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.’” Pg. 145

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rude should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” Pg. 148

“Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing. And how much of a sacrifice are we talking about here? How many Frasier and ER reruns does it take to make one American life complete? How many Richard Simmons infomercials? How many whiteboy/fatboy Beltway insiders on CNN? Oh man, don’t get me started. Jerry-Springer-Dr.-Dre-Judge-Jerry-Falwell-Donnie-and-Marie, I rest my case.” Pg. 149

“When my son Owen was seven or so, he fell in love with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, particularly with Clarence Clemons, the band’s burly sax player. Owen decided he wanted to learn to play like Clarence. My wife and I were amused and delighted by this ambition. We were also hopeful, as any parent would be, that our kid would turn out to be talented, perhaps even some sort of prodigy. We got Owen a tenor saxophone for Christmas and lessons with Gordon Bowie, one of the local music men. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Seven months later I suggested to my wife that it was time to discontinue the sax lessons, if Owen concurred. Owen did, and with palpable relief-he hadn’t wanted to say it himself, especially not after asking for the sax in the first place, but seven months had been long enough for him to realize that, while he might love Clarence Clemon’s big sound, the saxophone was simply not for him-God had not given him that particular talent. I knew, not because Owen stopped practicing, but because he was practicing only during the periods Mr. Bowie had set for him: half an hour after school four days a week. Plus an hour on weekends. Owen mastered the scales and the notes-nothing wrong with his memory, his lungs, or his eye-hand coordination-but we never heard him taking off, surprising himself with something new, blissing himself out. And as soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case with horn, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice-time. What this suggested to me was that when it came to the sax and my son, there was never going to be any real play-time; it was all going to be rehearsal. That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher. Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them; in fact, you may be following such a program already. If you feel you need permission to do all the reading and writing your little heart desires, however, consider it hereby granted by yours truly.”
Pg. 149-150

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease, an intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s paper and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processer.” Pg. 150

“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2000 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. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the work comes hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.” Pg. 154

“Your writing room doesn’t have to sport a Playboy Philosophy décor, and you don’t need and Early American rolltop desk in which to house your writing implements. I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs. The space can be humble, and it really needs only one thing: a door you are willing to shut.” Pg. 155

“As with physical exercise, it would be best to set your daily writing goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of the story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met.” Pg. 156

“I work to loud music-hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, and Metallica have always been my favorites-but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door. It surrounds me, keeps the mundane world out. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating you’re creating your own worlds.” Pg. 156

“So okay-there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth. The dictum in writing classes used to be “write what you know.” Which sounds good, but what if you want to write about starships exploring other planets or a man who murdered his wife and then tries to dispose of her body with a wood-chipper? How does the writer square either of these, or a thousand other fanciful ideas, with the “write-what-you-know” directive? I think you begin by interpreting “write what you know” as broadly and as inclusively as possible. If you’re a plumber, you know plumbing, but that is far from the extent of your knowledge; the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. ” pg. 160

“You as a beginning writer would do well not to imitate the lawyers-in-trouble genre Grisham seems to have created but to emulate Grisham’s openness and inability to do anything other than get right to the point. John Grisham, of course, knows lawyers. What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.” Pg. 162

“In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the train and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn’t James Caan) who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere out in the back of the beyond.” Pg. 165

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It’s far from easy. As I’ve said, we’ve all heard someone say, ‘Man, it was so great (or so horrible/strange/funny)…I just can’t describe it!’ If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. If you can do this, you will be paid for your labors, and deservedly so. If you can’t, you’re going to collect a lot of rejection slips and perhaps explore a career in the fascinating world of telemarketing.” Pg. 174

“Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Over-description buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story. I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue). I can’t remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the people in a story of mine looked like-I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well. If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can’t you? I don’t need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.” Pg. 174

“Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb. Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’” Pg. 181

“You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in Oxford, Mississippi, post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. Writing-class discussions can often be intellectually stimulating and great fun, but they also often stray far afield from the actual nuts-and-bolts of writing.” Pg. 236