Stephen King on Writing
I don’t need to introduce any writer to Stephen King. He’s the Nike of reading, the Coca-Cola. Not all of his work is a classic, but almost everybody has read at least one of his books — and everyone else has seen at least one of his movies. You might not love his work, but you know who he is.
King’s first book – Carrie – was published 50 years ago. Before that, he spent decades working towards that initial success. He’s written short stories, essays, novels, nonfiction books, op-eds, scripts, an autobiography, and just about every other kind of thing at one time or another.
He won’t win any Nobels or Pulitzers, but the man knows the business and craft of writing. Here are some of the most important bits of that knowledge he has chosen to share with us.
18 Stephen King Quotes on Writing
1. “The Scariest Moment is always just before you start.”
King isn’t just referring to writing a new manuscript here. He’s talking about taking on any new task. Just before you start is the point at which the most can go wrong. It’s also the point at which you have invested the least of your personal and emotional effort. It’s the easiest place to give up.
When I help aspiring writers, I find this applies especially to marketing, social media, web design, online payments – any non-writing skill they need but haven’t yet developed.
2. “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
This is the biggest, most important difference between an aspiring writer and a writer who achieves their goals. Sometimes writing is easy. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it feels impossible…but it never truly is. Having the discipline to sit down and write when you need to is a huge part of success in writing. If you have it, great. If you don’t, it’s time to develop that skill.
3. “I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.”
A literary agent I know describes writing fiction as a process of three steps:
- Step One: Put your protagonist in a tree
- Step Two: Throw rocks at your protagonist
- Step Three: Let the protagonist get themselves out of the tree
She and Mr. King would agree, I think. In both cases, the trick is to make readers care about an imaginary character, then fill that character’s days with misery, challenge, and woe. The greater that peril, the more powerful your story.
4. “By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
Mystery author Lawrence Block has a similar story about wallpapering his college dorm room with rejection slips. We can’t build a time machine, go back to our childhood or adolescence, and start submitting earlier. We have to start today. Submit early. Submit often. Make it part of your routine.
And while you’re at it, learn to love rejection. There will be a lot of it in your life as a writer. Some of it will hurt, but a lot will come with advice that will really help you make your next piece that much more likely to be accepted.
5. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.”
A lot of authors I work with hold back in their writing because they have an invisible censor looking over their shoulder. That censor asks them what their grandmother, or co-workers, or the people at church might think of the sentence they’re about to write. That censor may have a point about some aspects of living in polite society…but they’re dead wrong about how one makes art.
Art, including writing, comes from the rawest, most honest parts of ourselves. We all need the courage to reveal those pieces of ourselves, even if it’s scary. Even if grandma clucks her tongue and shakes her head.
6. “Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.”
This is the best advice I know of about how to avoid overwriting. Write just enough for the reader to understand what’s happening, and let their minds do the rest.
This is especially important in horror writing, where something implied but not revealed is often more terrifying than something clearly described.
7. “The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”
Too many wannabe writers don’t read. Another group – arguably worse – read, but don’t read in the genre where they want to find success. Both are making their lives as writers much harder than they need to be.
Reading, deeply and with a professional eye, is one of the best ways to learn how to write better. It also helps us stay abreast of what’s going on in the industry, and can even inspire us once in a while by setting an idea running loose from seeing something in an idea, character, or sentence.
8. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”
Here, King is talking about editing — about looking at the whole scene painted by your choices of words, sentences, and paragraphs. This level of perspective is vital to the editing and rewriting phases of our craft.
To that, I would add that you need to ask somebody else to also look at the forest. By the time you’ve finished a draft, you’ve spent too much time in the thicket. A clear head with broader a perspective is needed to really find out where to go next.
9. “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”
A lot of us, especially earlier in our careers, feel a need to show off. We use sesquipedalian words, complex plot structures, and deeply strange characters because that’s what “real” writers do, right?
Well, some of them. But most successful writers only do that when the story calls for it naturally. The rest of the time, they just write what comes. We should all give ourselves permission to do the same.
This also applies to genre. Don’t ever let anybody shame you for writing what you love, even if what you love to write is a genre your middle school English teacher told you was beneath the notice of literary types. Nobody gets to tell you that, especially you.
10. “When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.”
King also says that rewriting should pull at least 10% out of your word count. He’s right on both counts. Almost every first draft is bloated with extra words, scenes, chapters — even characters and plot arcs. They start early and leave the action late. Cut your work mercilessly, until only the best and most essential stuff remains.
11. “Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open.”
Hemingway said “Write drunk. Edit sober.” They were getting at the same idea.
When we write that first draft, the best stuff comes out of passion and momentum. When we let our ideas run wild, and type them without judgment, that’s when the good stuff really comes out. If we pause, if we get sidetracked by research or the spellchecker, that slows stuff down until the process and the prose become stagnant. We should write alone, so we’re never afraid of writing a mistake other people might see.
On the other hand, editing needs an outside perspective and the disinfecting powers of direct sunlight. Open that metaphorical door and invite the scrutiny of your beta readers, and your inner critic. When that first draft is done, it’s time to let it see the light of day.
12. “The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.”
We’ve all been told we were talented, but that doesn’t matter when it comes to writing professionally. Everybody writing at the level we’re hoping to reach had talent. Only those who develop skills make it.
As King says, accessing and expressing our imagination is a skill, and one we can exercise to make stronger. So are discipline, marketing, communication, editing, rewriting, and all the other parts of a successful writing career. Skills can be grown and developed, and it’s up to us to develop ours.
13. “The adverb is not your friend…I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
King is not shy about his suspicion of adverbs. We’ve talked about why before. Adverbs can usually be eliminated by opting for a more specific and colorful verb than the one you wanted to modify. About half of the rest of the time, you can just eliminate them and the sentence won’t be any weaker.
Yes, I know you’re thinking that one adverb in your favorite sentence is an exception and should stay. Mr. King would almost certainly disagree.
14. “On first drafts: It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”
This echoes his feelings about writing drafts with the door closed. The most important thing I think this iteration tells us is how okay it is for our first drafts to be terrible.
Most writer’s block comes from trying to get the words perfect instead of just getting the ideas out there as quickly as we can. Giving ourselves permission for our draft to suck — to be as silly and embarrassing as standing in public wearing tighty-whities and black knee socks — is one of the ways to beat it.
15. “If you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well.”
I see this as important in two ways. First, it’s a reminder that this isn’t always going to be joyful and whimsical. The words won’t always flow. We will have to do things, learn things, take on tasks we don’t want to. We have to work at this, just like any other worthwhile endeavor.
It also helps us justify taking the time and effort. If you feel like writing is play, a hobby, an idle pursuit, then you won’t be able to convince your friends and family to take it seriously. They will continue to interrupt your writing time, ask you not to prioritize your writing, and even resent the effort and time it takes. If you think of it as work, as a job, you’ve taken the first step in getting your people to do likewise.
16. “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 and making his magic.”
In a rare case of King taking more words than he needed, this is an important illustration of one of the great secrets of writing professionally. Put more succinctly:
The muse won’t come unless you drag it with you.
17. “What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth.”
I love this for two reasons. First, you have permission from King himself to write what makes you happy, what calls you, what amuses you, what you think will make a difference. Don’t listen to anybody but yourself about what you should put on the page.
Second, I love his admonition to be totally honest. Be truthful with the words you write, but also be honest with yourself if you followed that first bit of advice. Are you writing what you want to write, because you want to write it? Or are you writing what you think your partner, work buddies, or middle school English teacher would approve of?
18. “Good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas, but to recognize them when they show up.”
This applies not just to writing, but to luck in general. It’s not a matter of taking the right chance, or finding the right idea, of making the right move. Success in all endeavors is a matter of taking a lot of chances, having a ton of ideas, and making more moves than a rational person would imagine making.
Out of all of those efforts, some will be winners. And because you made it, you’ll be there to reap the rewards.
One Last Bit of Advice
This one is probably my favorite advice King gives, but he never says it out loud. He just lives it every day in how he speaks and what he puts out on social media. His wife, Tabitha is a writer herself – and King will tell anybody who listens that she’s by far the better writer in the family.
Having, and spending time with, literary heroes is a vital part of a successful writing career. It gives us something to aspire to, and somebody to keep us from getting too big for our britches when we experience some success.
Photo Credit: Stephanie Lawton (Octavia Books, November 12, 2011) CC BY 2.0
