On Writing by Stephen King

"I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs..."

This doctrine - albeit not quite biblical, but still helpful - was just one nugget of really good advice from Stephen King in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Regarding adverbs, King goes on to say, "The adverb is not your friend...To put it another way, they're like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day...fifty the day after that...and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it's - gasp! -too late."

I've never been interested in reading Stephen King's work before as I've never had any desire to have my pants scared off. But as I was working on my short story for the fiction contest held by World Magazine and Westbow Press in 2004, Craig took this book off the shelf (he had read and enjoyed it a couple years ago) and tossed it to me. I began reading and couldn't put it down.

Stephen King is an amazing writer (I was going to say an amazingly good writer, but then I remembered the above advice and changed it.) In this book he makes use of his own process of becoming a skilled writer to encourage the novice reading it to also become a skilled writer as well. While his choice of the more-than-occasional swear word was a tad distracting, given that King is not a Christian writing from a Christian worldview, I took him for what he is and tried to learn from him what I could. And, on writing, at least, he's a good one from whom to learn.

Something else King said that was especially good to hear: "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut. I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It's what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don't read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones."

That was good news to me because I like to read, too; I don't get through seventy to eighty books a year, but I do what I can. Two years ago, Craig and I set a goal to read three books a month. For the most part we are able to meet this goal. This has been great in that our desire to watch TV has lessened and we just naturally seem to gravitate toward the printed medium much more than we did last year. It has also facilitated our wanting to write more.

While I can't speak to the content of anything else Stephen King has written, if you are an aspiring writer and regardless of the worldview from which you write, On Writing is a necessary tool to have. It was definitely worth the time I spent reading it, and I have a feeling I'll be reading/referencing it again.