If you’ve been following along for any period of time, you’re familiar with my Fake Master’s Degree in Creative Writing and Indie Publishing from Ariele University.
Well, good news! I think I’m going to graduate this year! As such, you’ll probably see a surge of posts about writing as I complete my remaining assignments. You’ll also hear about my thesis project, which is rapidly nearing completion.
Today, I bring you a few, very short thoughts on the book On Writing, by Stephen King.
A Few Thoughts About ON WRITING by Stephen King
For as long as I’ve been involved in the writing community, people have been recommending the book On Writing by Stephen King. It is held up as the ultimate book on writing, due in no small part to the fact that its title is literally On Writing, it is LITERALLY a book on writing. To this end, I resisted reading it for a long time. I was worried that since everyone loved it so much, I would be disappointed.
Eventually, after I started doing a lot of workshops and presentations, I decided I should suck it up and read the stupid book. After the hundredth time someone told me, “You really should read it! It changed my life!” After the thousandth workshop attendee questioned whether I had anything valuable to say because I hadn’t read On Writing by Stephen King. Besides, Stephen King is a legendary writer. It couldn’t be that bad, right?
So I read the book.
I was less disappointed than I thought I would be. The truth be told, I thought the first half of the book was by and large uninteresting, unless you wanted to read a biography (or an auto-biography) of Stephen King’s life. Which, of course, may be quite interesting to some people. But I was looking for useful, practical stuff, and ultimately, King’s rise to fame can likely never be repeated.
(To be fair, he does use the word “memoir” in the title, so that mis-alignment of expectations is on me.)
The second half of the book, however, proved to be a lot more interesting. I liked the switch from the first half, with the break where he talks about how he got hit by a car in the middle of writing the book and it made him reconsider where he had been going with the book to begin with. From that point forward, I found the book educational. I found myself agreeing with him on most issues, though I tend to take a slightly softer stance. For example, when he says that adverbs pave to the road to hell, well, that’s a bit over the top, really. It does explain why everyone in the writing world is so anti-adverbs though.
The thing I disliked the most was the prescriptive attitude, that “THIS is the way to write a book.” I think this is a problem in the writing industry as a whole, however, and I don’t really think that his version of it is worse than anyone else’s. But one day, I’d like to see someone famous write a book called, “You can write however you want: the only rule is that there are no rules.”
Ultimately, I would say that if you are looking for a book that goes in depth into King’s life, and has some helpful writing tidbits in the second half, then this book is for you. If you just want the writing tidbits, skip the first half; if you just want to know more about King, skip the second half.
And if you’re tired of people telling you what to do, skip it entirely.
