Things I Learned from Stephen King

Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft gets a huge, glowing ***** from me.  I listened to the audio-book, which was narrated by King himself, and it was pure bliss from beginning to end.

In honor of the man himself, here are the things I learned from this reading:

1)  Closed Door/Open Door - When it comes to your writing, write the first draft with the "door closed."  This means "Do not let anyone read it," at least until you are done, and only then let your "ideal reader" read it.  On the second draft, write with the "door open."  Give the finished draft to a select group of readers so they might provide you with feedback.

2)  Ideal Reader - King claims that most writers write with an "Ideal Reader" in mind.  This Ideal Reader is the person the writer is essentially writing the text for, and in King's case it is his wife, Tabby.

3)  Buy William Strunk's "Elements of Style," which I did.  It teaches the writer to eliminate excess words, to be mindful of several stylistic preferences and rules that will make one's writing qualitatively better in the end.  When I received my copy in the mail and told Becki what it was she said, "Style?  Why do you need help with style?  When it comes to your clothes, you don't really have any style, honey."  It's about English, honey. Writing.  Bah!  It was pretty funny.

4)  A story is a fossil you unearth in its totality. It is not something you concoct with great intentionality.  It is a found thing, a discovery you dig up, dust off, and explore.  King finds that "What if" questions have, more often than not, led him to write his stories.  You ask the question, and in answering it you let your mind go, you go down the rabbit hole.

Thanks to this approach, I scrambled out of bed at 2:00 a.m. last Friday night, ran downstairs and wrote up three pages of notes about a possible 2nd book, and I remained quite satisfied with what I wrote.  It is fiction,  by the way, and something that will undoubtedly be infinitely easier to write than The Stained Glass Kaleidoscope has been (although I have certainly enjoyed writing it as well).  The story, as I discovered, really was there, waiting for me.  I have written up two possible sketches of future books through this method already.

5)  Read a lot and write a lot.  King does both.  He reads an average of 80 books a year, and cranks out 1000 words a day.  Of course, he gets to pursue the writing racket full-time.  I have read 6 or 7 books already in 2010, which is not bad at all in my estimate.  Especially considering my sister Alyssa is the real bookworm between us two siblings.

More to come...