Stephen King: “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully” | Hacker News Reader

Stephen King: “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully”

msu.edu

173 pointsdanso51 comments

Wasn't this just posted?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9130423

If you enjoyed this, read King's book "On Writing". It's half memoir, half an essay on writing for a living. The memoir part is interesting because he's had an interesting life, and it's closely tied to his writing career.

The writing part should be interesting to anyone who: likes reading fiction and thinking about how it is created; likes writing and has spent time about how to do it well; has spent time thinking about how to a particular thing well.

Agreed. "On Writing" is one of the best books on writing better that I have ever read. Highly, highly recommended. I keep having to purchase more because I give my copies away!

Parts of this article are repeated almost verbatim in that book. (That's a compliment, not a complaint. It's a fantastic book. Anyone who wants to write for a living, and most people who do not, should read it.)

It's an excellent book, and I highly recommend it, but it's also very personal and idiosyncratic in much of its advice. King is a writer of a particular type, and he's talking about the way he writes, which may or may not be the way you write (it's almost completely antithetical to the way I write, which is why I learned so much from it.)

It's been years since I've read it but "On Writing" is still one of my favorite books of all time. It's worth reading whether you write much or not. His description of the time he was struck by a van (and nearly killed) while walking down the road near his home with his head in a paperback book is alone worth the read. He said the guy driving the van was reaching into a box of raw meat and tossing chunks to a dog in the back of the van and didn't see him walking on the side of the road. He said it was like a scene from one of his novels. I recall that he also goes into some detail about how he struggled through a long period of near poverty with his wife Tabitha always supporting him and staying by his side. So she deserves tremendous credit for his success. For me the book was more about persevering through the struggle to create in general.

I found his talk about addiction the most striking.

> He said it was like a scene from one of his novels.

Incidentally, Stephen King ended up actually putting that scene into one of his novels, the seventh book of the Dark Tower. This was fitting, I thought, since the idea of the Dark Tower is that it contains all worlds, real and fictional, including our own.

Loved that book, and I'm not even remotely interested in writing.

Funny thing is, the two elements I remember the most from what I learned inside are at what could be considered both extreme of the "importance spectrum": double the s (the kids's toys) and don't write adjectives to give feelings and emotions when your task is to create them (if something is awesome, don't write "it's awesome", make it read/feel/look awesome).

I see "On Writing" as a very interesting insight into the life and method of Stephen King and a limited, and in some respects possibly even counterproductive guide to actually being a successful novelist. I do remember a good passage on how to make a scene-setting description hone in on interesting details, but I also recall an extended rant on the subject of adverbs that basically boiled down to "don't use them".

And counterproductive? King's approach to plotting is described as essentially thinking his characters into difficult situations and then figuring out the details of how they'll extricate themselves as he goes along. This works very well for Stephen King, but certainly isn't the only way successful authors approach plotting, and some of the meticulous planners are extremely good and successful writers too. It's people that don't have an innate flair for structuring novel length texts as they go along that are most likely to pick up books with titles like "on writing" though...

As an autobiography and homage to his passion, it's brief and very readable though.

The 16-page chapter "Toolbox" is an absolute must-read. The rest of the book (don't get me wrong, it's very good too) seems filler to make the volume a viable book.

"On Writing" is the only Stephen King book I've read. Definitely left a huge impact on my perception on fiction writing.

I listened to On Writing as an audiobook narrated by Stephen King himself and I recommend it even to people that are not interested in writing.

Agreed. I've actually been reading this recently- not quite to the end.

Also interesting is that I think King's latest movie, A Good Marriage (2014), may have been loosely based on an idea he submits as a exercise to the reader in On Writing: iirc, King describes a situation which involves a woman estranged from her abusive husband being home alone while the child is at school and the husband unexpected comes into the house.

King asks the reader to write a short story based on this situation and send him and to send him an email with the story and the readers thoughts and how they came to write it.

I've not seen the movie or read Full Dark, No Stars (2010) that contained the novella it is based on, but that situation seemed similar.

Nice read. I like how he doesn't wax philosophical about knowing if one is talented or not. If one can't take enough queues from the real world, then they most likely are delusional.

For the HN audience, #4 is the most relevant one. Too many things I read here have high school-level writing. The authors cared more about getting their half-baked opinion out on their Medium blog over proofreading (excluding ESLs). One of the best lessons from college is when one of my history professors metaphorically tore me a new asshole for not knowing how to write on one essay, and out of pity, gave me a grace period to fix it. He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible. I had other writing-intensive classes after that one and never had such an event happen again.

*cues

No, queues. You gotta wait in line just like everyone else.

> You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later.

Yes, but don't forget to get back to that "correct it later" step...

Clearly didn't proofread enough...

>He highlighted enough of my superfluous fluff that I finally got writing and how one must write as little as possible.

Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

If you're writing non-fiction, maybe. If you're writing literature, to hell with rules. How impoverished our culture would be if all writing held itself to the same standard.

He actually seems to cover this point in "know the market." If your market is high literature, then the words that would be extraneous in a newspaper aren't extraneous there.

>Right, because Joyce, Pynchon, and Nabokov would have benefited from being told to write "as little as possible".

They might have. Especially Pynchon, but Joyce too.

In fact, if Joyce had written nothing at all, that might not have been a bad thing.

I was afflicted with having to read "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" in high school. In it, Joyce puts forth his theory of art - that to be pure art, it should cause no response whatsoever in the viewer. Joyce is a great writer, and was able to achieve the effect he wanted - to write a book that produces no response whatsoever in the reader (other than the feeling of revulsion at being forced to waste my time reading it). But because his theory of art is rubbish, he wastes his talent producing "art" that is a complete waste, both of his talent and of the reader's time.

Would you be able to quote a passage from the book where Joyce claims that that's his view? It's been a long time since I read Portrait of the Artist, but I don't recall that being in the book, nor does it sound like something Joyce would say.

At any rate, even if that really was the goal he set for himself, he failed. Ulysses elicited a wide range of responses from me.

Would I be able to quote it? No. It's in a conversation between Stephen and his friend as they walk around Dublin, and the book describes exactly which streets they walk down and where they turn and whose yard they pass while they're having the conversation. I remember one specific snippet: Stephen asks if lightning strikes a block of wood (stump, maybe?) and blasts it into a specific shape (a cow, maybe?), is that art?

I mean, there was a scene or two in Portrait that I responded to, too. But mainly, it was a protagonist I didn't care about, doing things I didn't care about, with other people I didn't care about, in places I didn't care about. So "no response whatsoever" is a pretty fair summary of my reaction.

Stephen's theories aren't Joyce's theories, and the style in which Joyce writes is never Joyce's voice, in the sense that writers today are always prattling on about 'finding their voice' (the styles of Dubliners, Portrait, Ulysses, and the Wake accomplish very different things).

The tragedy of Portrait is that so many people read it as if it were simple autobiography. It isn't. Stephen is based on the young Joyce, yes, and in the original draft and notes (mostly destroyed, published as Stephen Hero) there's a saccharine sincerity that fits your sense of the book a little better.

But that's not the finished Portrait. In Portrait Joyce makes fun of himself. He's critical of his youthful exuberance. It's a hilarious book for anyone who's ever taken themselves too seriously, which, I think, is all of us.

When you're trying to build a richly detailed world in your readers' minds, "as little as possible" might still be quite a lot of writing. But even such a detailed piece of work can suffer from superflous words and pointlessly convoluted grammar. Every letter of a finely crafted piece of writing should contribute to the intended effect.

This is one of the problems I've had back in my teens when I was reading fiction. Especially authors of fantasy or science fiction novels seemed to be very keen to describe their worlds in the most intricate details possible. And as a result they became very strenuous to read to the point where I simply stopped reading them at all. I think (and this is entirely subjective) that if you need to describe your fictional world in such perfect detail then maybe a book is simply the wrong medium. Then you should maybe opt for drawing a comic, where you can put all the power of your imagination into actual pictures.

"As simple as possible as possible, but no simpler than that." - Albert Einstein

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away" - Exupery

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." - Emerson

"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire

Witty sayings are not meant to prove anything. They are meant to quickly make a point. Especially if the one who uses them is not as eloquent as the one who wrote them.

I agree that deciding what's superfluous fluff and what's not is entirely subjective and that it should be an artist's freedom to decide how he expresses himself. However King's advice was written in the context of how to write successfully and I have little doubt that the average reader prefers brief rather than quaint wording that drives the story forward.

I don't know. I read a lot of amazon books from newish authors.

I have had to put more than a few books down because the author was putting a lot of words down, but not really saying anything.

I think the content/word-count ratio is important.

my critique of new authors is more along the lines of how blatant they in their characterizations. I don't think I've ever read a book and thought "this person is just too long winded".

Well, that's not true. Jules Verne.... I could never finish 20,000 Leagues under the Sea despite being immensely interested in the story as a youngster.

I'm not sure I quite expected to see this on HN, though I'm glad it was posted since I happen to be trying to learn novel writing. I thought the before and after example of the basketball article was a concise and clear way to explain over-writing. The second version was clearer, more accessible, less obnoxious and no less informative and narrative. A series of poetry and short fiction teachers in college helped me become self-aware about this bad habit. I still make the mistake consistently, but I have learned to either catch it or agree with the suggestions of my peers who catch it when I don't.

I personally believe that programmers can learn from poets, for example. Write constantly. Read the work of others, both critically and for enjoyment. Writing is the sexy part, but revising is at least as important a task.

I find your last sentence amusing because I actually prefer editing to writing. It's when I'm editing that I feel like I'm actually applying a craft. I get the same kind of satisfaction from editing my words that I do from refactoring my code. In both cases, it is often only after doing the initial work that I realize how it should be structured, and reworking it into that elegant structure is satisfying.

I am the same way. I found it surprising. I get so much positive feedback from the editing process that I have actually developed a routine of editing as I draft. Although it improves the quality of my draft, it takes ages. For poetry, it worked well. For novels, I think I'll need to break the habit.

Though for what it's worth, I've seen a lot of professional authors that warn about that as another kind of trap that beginners fall into. That is, paying too much attention to the revision process, at the expense of producing actual finished works.

I never thought to compare writing words and writing code, but it's true. The writing phase is simply getting all the ideas out, and the editing phase is to make... beauty out of chaos!

Can't agree with you more, both for refactoring code and editing prose.

I find it also sometimes helps to perform the revisions while in a somewhat altered state of mind (be it mood, setting, music, minor inebriation, or otherwise). It helps you look at the first draft with fresh eyes and see better ways of structuring things and removing excess. Make a version with your prospective changes, then compare the before and after copies a day or two later (this time sober if you weren't before...).

>I'm not sure I quite expected to see this on HN

I think it belongs - What he is suggesting carries over to technical endeavours as well.

1. Learning to cut mercilessly improved clarity of my emails and documentation.

2. Learning to put my head down and carry on till a project is first draft complete, warts and all improved my ability to actually _complete_ things.

3. Peer review as a bullshit detector is good.

I'll take Poe or Lovecraft over King any day for entertainment, but I might just crack 'on writing' after reading this article. The man sounds pretty dialed in.

It doesn't always look like King practices the brevity he preaches in his own work, this is one of the points that he's often criticized (in a snickering sort of way in literary circles, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King#Critical_response). As an example I thought the first two volumes of the Dark Tower series, especially the first one was great, but the volumes got thicker and thicker later. However, just now I found a comparison of approx. word counts of the series with other epic series and his books do not seem to be excessively long (http://cesspit.net/drupal/node/1869/).

What I found really neat about King's advice is its practicality. This, I think, makes his points applicable to young writers as well as young entrepreneurs, esp. (1) and (7) can be combined to pg's motto of "Make smt that people want."

    > 8. Ask yourself frequently, "Am I having fun?"
    > The answer needn't always be yes. But if it's always no, it's time for a new project or a new career.

Reminds me of this quote from Steve Jobs's commencement address[0]:

> When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

[0] https://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

My favorite rule from "On Writing" is "Second Draft = First Draft - 10%". What a godsend that rule is.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elements-Style-Fourth-Edition/dp/0...

A good companion piece. Really, if you want to know how to write, and barely have time to make breakfast, The Elements of Style is the book for you.

Point 1 reminds me of Steve Jobs' famous line" "Real Artists ship".

He didn't list the last rule - there are no rules. I.e. various guidelines to creativity are useful of course, but it also involves the chaotic element. Trying to turn it into a very rigid system reduces its value.

I feel like some of this applies to programming and creativity in general. The difference with programming, is too often they don't go back and edit the first draft.

What about non-fiction?

Except, perhaps for rule five, all of those seem applicable to nonfiction. Though the measures for "talent" are rather different between the two. In the case of seven, "Write to be informative" might suffice, in the sense that your greatest purpose is to have the reader come away from your having absorbed as much of the material successfully as possible. Though with that said, most of the best nonfiction books I've read, even textbooks, had the occasional traces of humor and other lightheartedness.

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