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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.)

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.

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!

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.)

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.

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.

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

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