On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
by Stephen King
Sribner
Show, don’t tell. If you are a writer, you have heard this. If you haven’t, it’s time to emerge from whatever basement you haven’t left since becoming one. At its heart, the idea stems from imagery, in the loosest sense of the term. The writer gives the reader the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and the reader is then expected to reach the same conclusions as the writer. It’s agonizing, listening to writers explain their ideas. This little dictum, traced back through decades of writing workshops, books on craft, and lecture halls, is the first thing a young impressionable and let’s be honest fawn-like writer will hear when he announces his aspiration to make a dent in the literary world. What’s bizarre, of course, is that in the realm of books on writing—you could call them manuals on craft—this advice is altogether ignored.
Stephen King is one of those writers self-proclaimed literary authors avoid reading. We perceive his books as entertainment rather than art, having long forgotten that art can entertain. He’s all about story—putting characters in tough situations and seeing how they react. He must be doing something right, because as of this moment, King has written 49 novels. Those novels, according to a BBC report, have sold more than 350 million copies. According to Forbes, King made $34 million between June 2009 and June 2010, making him the third highest paid author in the world, behind James Patterson and Stephanie Meyer. The literary sect—we scoff at money. Anyone can sell books, but, as we all know, writing is about art, not sales. Unfortunately, we had nothing to say when King, in 2003, was granted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
Much to our chagrin, Stephen King is a good writer. You can’t get around it.
What can we learn from him? From a man who generally writes horror, realist science fiction, fantasy, and books that are straight out creepy, we wouldn’t think it could be much. But that’s the astonishing thing about him: he’s an extraordinary teacher. When it came out in 2000, King’s On Writing was greeted with rather unfavorable reviews in the mainstream media, even prompting a New York Times Magazine article called, “What is Stephen King Trying to Prove?” “Nothing can disguise the fact,” said Gary Kirst of Salon, “that nearly all of [this book] is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times before.” The truth is that we have heard it before, but that’s not what’s so remarkable about On Writing. The truth is that we haven’t been shown it before.
King’s book is full of straight advice. “If you want to be a writer,” he says, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” On adverbs: “The adverb is not your friend.” On the passive voice: “[it makes] me want to scream.” “The paragraph,” he says, “not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing.” Of course a writer couldn’t put together a book like this without that basic advice. On Writing is meant for writers of all skill levels, those just starting to write or ten years at their desks. What separates this book from others like it, however, lies in its subtitle: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
The first 100 pages of King’s book is a section called “C.V.” Here the book reads like a memoir. “[My friend] and I like just about any horror movie,” he tells us, recounting his days as a pre-adolescent and giving a little insight into his taste. When a hideous, nun-like faculty member asks him why he wants to write “junk like this in the first place,” King remembers:
I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.
Here’s a book where an extraordinarily successful writer shows his audience how he became a writer. He recounts his years slaving away over a beat up typewriter in his childhood bedroom, pinning rejection letter after rejection letter to a spike above his desk. After his marriage, we’re shown a young couple struggling to pay the bills and raise two children. Meanwhile, King is tucked away in the laundry room, his typewriter on his lap, writing the first draft of Carrie. We’re excited for King when Carrie is accepted for publication, despite the $2,500 advance. “I didn’t know that [it was a small advance],” he tells us. “I had no literary agent to know it for me.” Then King’s life changes forever. Carrie goes to a paperback publisher for $400,000, half of which, according to King’s contract, is his. From there, we learn that writing, despite our perceptions, doesn’t get any easier. By the time we get to the later sections of the book—“What Writing Is”, “Toolbox”, “On Writing”, “On Living”—we trust King to talk to us about the thing we love most. That’s when he reveals his stance on adverbs and the passive voice. That’s when he tells us that “Plot is… the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice.” Stories, he says, “are found things, like fossils in the ground… The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” King’s story is a fossil all on its own—a writer who is just as passionate about his work as our most literary authors, only trying to brush the dirt away from the bone. He shows us that fossil, and the result is an inspirational, thrilling book for any writer, one that makes writing seem—though exceedingly difficult—very possible. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t soliloquize. He gives us the facts—what was said, what it sounded like, where it was said, when it was said, and what that where and when looked like—and we make of them what we will.
