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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

By: Stephen King
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: James Bennett Pty Ltd
ISBN: 0743455967
ISBN-13: 9780743455961
Released: 01 Jul 2002
RRP: £4.07
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Pretty helpful... best part is about his own youth - By: Dmitri M. A. Hubbard, 30 Mar 2008
This is reallly three books - one about his own youth & upbringing. This is energetic, eloquent & insightful into the writer that we alll know & love. Second comes his viewpoints on writing. They are pretty helpful & also quite concise, & should help anyone serious about the craft. However, I found the third part about his accident uninteresting. I know that it is a fact it happened, but many of us have been through similar experiences. I don't reallly empathise with the author through this part.

However, it is on the whole a candid look at an amazing man, & will make people think twice about the great dividing line between popular fiction & literature.
Marvelous - By: Joseph Haschka, 03 Mar 2006
ON WRITING is better than I thought it would be. It's marvelous. I finished it in less than two days.

In the First Forward, Stephen King observes that popular novelists are never "asked about the language" when queried by admiring fans. Thus, he states:

"What follows is an attempt to put down , briefly & simply, how I came to the craft (of telling stories on paper), what I know about it now, & how it's done. It's about the day job; it's about the language."

In the first hundred or so pages, King shares his experiences growing up in Maine & Connecticut, his marriage, his struggles as a novice writer, & his drug & alcohol problems. King intends this section not as an autobiography, but as a curriculum vitae. It ends with the assignment of the paperback rights to CARRIE, his first novel.

In the next 150 pages, the author describes how he performs his craft. He explains the "tools" of writing (vocabulary & grammar), the creative environment (the room, the door, the determination to close the door, & the music - Hard Rock in King's case), style & formatting (paragraphing, narration, description, & dialogue), & the final stretch to a finished piece (drafts, editing, & proofreading by a trusted friend - wife/author Tabitha in King's case).

The final few pages, in a way, are the most interesting. It's Stephen's account of the road accident in 1999 that inflicted multiple fractures to his ribs & lower body, & the effect the mishap had on his writing. Ironicallly enough, he'd half completed this book at the time of the incident, & he had to struggle to come back & finish.

Though King was once a high school English teacher, ON WRITING is in no way pedantic, but chatty & informal. It's a book straight from the author's heart, & it shows.

"Don't wait for the muse ... This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine 'til noon or seven 'til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar & making his magic."

The author's first rule for good writing is that the writer must read a lot. Well, I do that - constantly. Perhaps I can improve my own poor scribbling. In this review, I've followed his advice; I've kept the paragraphs short & avoided use of passive sentence construction. That's something, at least.

The Building Blocks of a Career in Writing Fiction - By: Donald Mitchell, 24 Jul 2004
Every course I ever took about writing discouraged me from writing fiction. The process described seemed unnatural, uninteresting, & unbelievably complex. So I became a nonfiction writer. Mr. Stephen King's memoir & observations about his methods has totallly turned that around. He proposes a method that works much like the way I write nonfiction. Following his advice, I feel like I can create & enjoy creating novels now. That is a wonderful gift, & I appreciate the insights very much. I also wondered how a novelist goes from aspiring to full-time writer. The detailed descriptions here gave me many "ah-ha" experiences. Mr. King's horrible accident made me curious about how his recovery was going. I was fascinated by the long postscript that describes how the "writing" part of the memoir was written during his painful rehabilitation & mending.

This book should be read by everyone who loves fiction writing, whether as a reader or a writer. If salty language bothers you, that will be a drawback. I deliberately listened to the unabridged audiocassette so that I could hear the nuances of meaning from his voice & timing. I'm glad I did.

Mr. King's great strength is that he tells it like it is, & does so as simply as possible.

His description of letting a novel tell itself through the characters, starting from a fascinating situation, struck me as an enormous insight. In nonfiction, the equivalent is to start with a painful problem that almost everyone has. Then tell stories that take the reader inside the solution. Be honest & genuine in how you do it. I suddenly realized that nonfiction writers have an advantage because we can test our stories with those who lived them. The fiction writers have to use their own mental ear & those of readers to do the same thing.

After you finish reading this book, you definitely should try out his suggestion to write a thousand words a day. I know it sounds like a lot, but your speed & facility will rapidly increase. And it reallly does feel like being more alive!

Tell the truth!

Will the real Stephen King stand up? - By: B. Chandler, 16 Jun 2004
This was money well spent. This book is more than the title implies. First it is a selected biography of Stephen King. I enjoyed the poison ivy episode. This is not a deviation but an explanation of why he writes the way he does & the background that he draws on. Secondly this is a "how to write like Stephen King" book it reflects his likes & dislikes. I agree with most of them. I suppose that that is why I like his novels.

However I can only guess that he must spend a lot of time around people that cuss. It is not like he is not aware of it. I feel that he is somewhat proud of the fact that he cusses a lot. Luckily he said it is not necessity to be excessive.

I share his dislike for flashbacks. And he also expresses several dislikes for other stilting crutches, including excessive description of Back-story.
An added bonus is his description of the van accident that a certain comedian commented about saying that Stephen lost his Tommyknockers. Stephen forgot to mention that he bought the van that hit him for destruction purposes. Talk about revenge.

Over alll after reading this I was compelled to try my hand at writing.
Any beginners serious about writting should have this Audio - By: , 14 Mar 2001
This is one of the most helpful pieces of information I was able to find. After attending short courses, reading self-help books & dummies guides, I finnalllly found what I was looking for. A no nonsence guide to the craft.