On Writing by Stephen King

On Writing is part memoir, part guide to the craft. As someone who admires Stephen King’s influence and wants to write myself, it’s only natural to see what one of the greatest of all time has to say about the process.

King splits the book into two halves. The first is a brief autobiography, highlighting key moments from his youth and early adulthood. He also discusses his battles with addiction and the moment that sparked the idea for Carrie.

To give a snapshot: King has been writing his entire life. He had a nail on his wall where he’d stick rejection letters – eventually upgrading to a bigger spike when the pile got too large. In high school, he and a friend ran a newspaper out of his backpack mocking his teachers until the faculty found out who it was.

After marrying his wife Tabitha at a young age and starting a family, money was tight. They lived in a double-wide trailer, and King worked as a high school English teacher for $6,000 a year. In the evenings, he’d sit in the laundry space of the trailer, using his daughter’s toy desk across his knees to write.

One day, he started writing a few pages from the perspective of a high school girl but didn’t like it and threw it away. The next day, his wife had dug the pages out of the trash, brushed off the cigarette ash, and told him, “I like this. You’re going to keep writing.” King protested, saying he didn’t know anything about high school girls. She replied, “I’ll help you with those parts when you need.” Flash forward, he received a $400,000 check for his first published book, Carrie, and never again had to work a day job to support his writing.

The rest of On Writing, aside from a brief postscript about the 1999 accident where he was hit by a van, focuses on the craft of writing itself.

One of my favorite parts is the brief interlude called What Writing Is, which comes between the autobiography section and the main “On Writing” portion:

What Writing Is: Telepathy, of course. It’s amusing when you stop to think about it – for years people have argued about whether or not such a thing exists, folks like J. B. Rhine have busted their brains trying to create a valid testing process to isolate it, and all the time it’s been right there, lying out in the open like Mr. Poe’s Purloined Letter. All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. Perhaps I’m prejudiced, but even if I am, we may as well stick with writing, since it’s what we came here to think and talk about.

Look – here’s a table covered with red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. The most interesting thing here isn’t even the carrot-munching rabbit in the cage, but the number on its back. Not a six, not a four, not nineteen-point-five. It’s an eight. This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room… except we are together. We are close. We’re having a meeting of the minds. We’ve engaged in an act of telepathy. No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy.

I think On Writing is a worthwhile read for anyone, even if you’re not a literature fan, because it gives you a window into the mind of a professional at the top of his craft. It’s not just what he says about writing – it’s how he talks about it. He shows a level of expertise and understanding that I think is admirable for any discipline.

Another often-overlooked aspect of any craft is the sheer work. King describes his process, and it’s clear that many authors don’t just sit down and spit out perfect prose. It’s like music: singers usually don’t create number-one hits in five minutes; I’ve seen artists spend dozens of hours mixing a three-minute song.

There’s a common rule that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. King has spent that many times over on writing – it’s inseparable from who he is.