Review: On Writing by Stephen King
On Writing has been one of my favourite books this year. I wouldn’t normally say this about an English course book which I have been forced, head first, into reading and drowning in, like so many of the other books I have had to read over my last two semesters (Mrs Dalloway being only one of them), but this book; this ‘writing Bible’, should I say, was certainly an exception.
In my world, Stephen King is a God. He has written over 50 books and short stories, many of which have been made into films (Carrie and The Shining only naming a few). He has sold over 350 million copies of his work worldwide and sits on a very comfortable £40 million pound salary a year. Even if you didn’t ever want to pursue a career in writing, Stephen’s salary could easily change your mind. That isn’t to say Stephen had it easy. He worked his way up a very difficult class-and-money-pressured ladder, right from a world where he worked at a Mill and lived in a trailer with two kids and his wife, this being something I found out from On Writing. He worked his way up into the heavenly platform of his writing godliness. He worked hard. He aimed and he scored. And for that I respect him even more.
I will not bore you with a long string of adverbs and adjectives which describe and essentially try and sell this book to you, (for one thing Stephen tells us in the book explicitly NOT to overuse adverbs as they’re often pointless and kill the suspense of a text). But what I will tell you is to buy it. Or at least rent a copy out of the library. It is a MUST have for all beginner writers, for all professional writers even, who think they know what they are doing in the writing business, but really don’t know because they haven’t read this book. And even if they do know what they’re doing, there is nothing like some good old sarcastic infused advice from the God of writing: Stephen King to help you in becoming an even better writer.
Despite this though, there were some things I disagreed with in the book. One, to name a few, was Stephen’s view that the plot was not as important as the characters and the situation; that the plot came as a product of the two and if you just keep writing your plot unravels itself from the knot of words and sentences that haven’t been written. For me, what he was essentially saying here was to not plan out your book. He was encouraging a ‘go-with-the-flow’ attitude, which could lead to gaping plot holes and a lack of character movement. J.K Rowling, when interviewed about the writing process of Harry Potter, said that she planned the franchise for five years before even putting pen to paper. In some instances, it is important to plan. How can you create an entire world or an entire franchise of successful children’s books without at least thinking about what is going to happen somewhere along the line? Perhaps Stephen, at this point, was appealing to the ‘horror-writer’ or his ‘Ideal Reader’ who picked up his novel. Perhaps horror stories are better written without a complete plan of what could happen to a character. But, for me, you still need to know where a book is going before you start writing. Otherwise, you could end up going around in very confused and mist-entangled circles.
That being said, the book did offer some of the best advice I have ever been given. Stephen talks through the writer’s tool box – the nuts and bolts that have to be screwed in and fixed in order to become a writer. Things such as: grammar, vocabulary, paragraphing and style. He talks about the process of writing a novel, having an ‘Ideal Reader’ in mind and how to contact agents and publishers. The novel was also entertaining which set it apart from most English course text books because although this was what it essentially was, it was also enjoyable and fun, something I never ever thought I would say about a text book.
Most of all though, the novel really has a moral: don’t give up. Writers hear those kind of words all the time, but this message seems to be weaved through the strings of sentences and quirky dripping one-liners in this book. Don’t give up. It is something Stephen was told and had to keep telling himself. And there is something quite nice about being told, by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time, not to give up hope, even if you’re being told through the pages of a million to one copy and it is a book written for the masses and not for you in particular. There is something pretty special about that; and this book is definitely pretty special and certainly makes you feel that way too.