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Editorial Review:
Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You are right there with the young author as he is tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing baby-sitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash". But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing".
King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph and literary models. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.com
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
A must read for aspiring writers A fantastic book for anyone interested in writing. Stephen King is a writer I've only discovered recently, and I've been really enjoying his books. As an aspiring writer I got curious about what his advice might be for a new writer. I'll keep this brief as other reviewers have been in general agreement. Some of the tips he gives are simple but will genuinely stick (for me it was adverbs). You might find these tips in other books - I've bought a few - but the difference is King really knows how to WRITE... more info
Wisdom from the Master It's no secret that Stephen King is the world's bestselling author. How he does that, is explained by himself in this book. The first part of the book is a short, although insightful, autobiography. In this part King talks about his childhood, how he first became interested in horror and in writing and how his life was before he became world famous. The larger part of the book is about writing. How to do it and how to do it well. Unlike some books on writing, King is not orthodox about this... more info
The Bible on writing. Quite simply, if you want to be a writer, this is a must read. Succinct, brilliantly arrogant at times, but he tells it as it is. Recommend without reservation.
Good advice from a guy who gets things done I'm not generally a huge fan of King's books or his writing style, although he has written plenty of good stuff all the same. I suppose I am one of the literary snobs who Stephen King would not like. This memoir / advice on writing handbook was worth a read if for no other reason than King gets things done and has a remorseless work ethic. Anybody in any walk of life could learn from his example. King was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and worked exceptionally hard for his success. He did so... more info
