On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Stephen King doesn’t organize a plot before he starts writing down his haunting stories.  I learned this about halfway through his On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, and I was fascinated with the reasoning behind what strikes me as a risky way to write.   

He begins with a situation, a tantalizing moment in ordinary life, that in his imagination brims with menace.  The situation begs for development.   And, because it is Stephen King’s imagination, the situation moves irresistibly to perversity and culminates in delicious horror. 

Even for the author.  King says that the end of the story is as much a surprise to him as it is to the reader.

A “Situation”

Here’s an example.  While driving on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, King stopped at an old-fashioned filling station where an attendant pumped the gas.  As the tank was filling, the sound of a stream swollen by snow melt drew King to the back of the station.    Junk yard debris had accumulated along the stream bank where King strolled.  Suddenly, he slipped and slid towards the roaring water. King managing to avoid tumbling into the stream by grabbing the corner of a half-buried engine block sticking out of the mud.

Pulling himself to his feet and brushing off his wet butt, King thought that this situation would make a good story.  He thought, “What if someone had slid into the water and disappeared?  What if the car stood empty at the pumps for hours until the attendant phoned the state police?  What if—and this is where the story takes a wild turn—the missing person was an alien, and his car was of no known brand?”

How the Story Develops

It’s the elaboration and then resolution that becomes the plot, although Stephen King insists he doesn’t like plots.  Instead of plotting, King asks himself, “what would he do or what would real people do in this situation?”  He writes it all down.  Backstory and endings emerge on their own. 

As I read about King’s process, I decided that I couldn’t trust my own creative muse enough to let it guide me through a whole novel.  In fact, I’ve been thinking that I’d be a lot better off if I’d outline my blog posts before I started writing.  I like to plan and have everything laid out, preferably on a bulletin board with post-it notes and yarn. 

But I’m not writing novels.  And I figured that if I’m going to write a review of On Writing I ought at least try some of King’s suggestions.  So, for this post, I resisted the idea of organizing ahead of time, placed my hands on the keyboard, and typed.  Then I revised.  The reader can decide how this has turned out.

Writing Courageously

King wants writers to banish timidity.  He insists that able-to-be-developed situations will come.  Plot turns will commend themselves.  And characters will show some new aspect of their personalities at just the point in the writing when the author needs to know about them.

Writing a novel, or at least a Stephen King story, is like taking dictation.  Sometimes it moves so fast that the author scribbles to get it all down.

I was relieved as I read this section of On Writing with the knowledge that I’m not trying to make up a tale that will keep millions of readers unable to set it down.  My writing consists of blog posts. I have the leisure to ruminate over new ideas before I write or teach them. If people are curious about my classes or miss a session, they can go to my website and catch up.  I also write book reviews like this one.

On Writing contains more tips than I need for my writing.   The book’s first chapters bristle with King’s memories from his childhood. These memories made it evident that he was destined to be an author, even an author of scary tales.    Even before high school, Stephen King created ghoulish stories, published them, and persuaded his classmates to hand over dimes and quarters for a mimeographed copies.  These publishing adventures showed King’s promise as an author, even though he was innocently plagiarizing pulp magazines and crossing lines of propriety with his humor.  His written comedy targeted and earned the wrath of teachers and won gales of laughter from friends.

Old Fashioned Values

Stephen King is a couple of years older than me, and his baby boomer values felt familiar.  His work ethic is an example.  His is a life, not of effortless success, but one that has married giftedness and toil.  He has dedicated himself to writing for his whole life, has had his share of rejection letters, writes daily in an uninteresting room with the door closed, and always carries a book. 

I’m already following the practice of carrying a book.  My kindle is in my pocket as I write this.  “Read a lot and write a lot,” is standard issue writer’s advice and Stephen King says it too.  The edition of this book that I read has three appendices of books that King has read and recommends.  I read these lists not noting titles that I need to get to, but thinking that Stephen King is an indefatigable reader. 

I’m not a reader of King’s novels.  This may be the second of his books that I’ve read cover to cover.  I’m guessing that the most common reader reaction to King’s work is the speculation that only a twisted person could think up such twisted stories. 

But that’s not what I got from On Writing.

King is a simple guy.   His perversity may be no more twisted than that of most people.  He’s only better at getting it on paper and letting it create a story that carries a point worth thinking about. 

Drugs and Alcohol

With the same bold prose that carries his novels along, King sets before the reader his own struggle with chemical addiction, and the loving intervention that brought sobriety and productivity back to his life.   

What King writes about his addiction inspired me.  I found his chief motivation for kicking his habits, namely to preserve his marriage, to be self-effacing.  There’s no triumphalism in his journey from alcoholism and drugs.  Nowhere does he hint, “Hey, I’m one of the world’s top popular authors.  It would be ashamed if I succumbed to what takes down so many.  That’s why I decided on another course and I steeled my self and muscled my way through.” 

There’s none of that.

King adores his wife, Tabatha.  He credits her love for his deliverance from chemicals.  He appreciate her gentle push to start writing again.  

Further, King composes his stories with her in mind as his primary reader and critic.  He gets a kick out of making her laugh as she reads his first drafts.  King shares enough about their life together and their household to suggest 1960’s era traditionalism.

Writing Tips 

The middle of the On Writing the reader gets tips that will strengthen any writer’s prose.  

There is one tip that comes before the middle section. King shares a lesson that came to him early when a teacher rolled up one of his mimeographed stories, brandished it, and scolded little Stephen for writing junk.  But King never changed his genre.  His “junk” only got better. 

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, that’s all.

Cut Unnecessary Words

In approximately the middle of On Writing the author says that competent writers, with work, can become good ones.  With this he offers tips.  These begin with Strunk and White’s immortal “avoid unnecessary words.”  The two classic tactics that trim sentence size are 1) using the possessive: “house’s entrance” rather than “entrance of the house;” and 2) elimination of adverbs.  Adverbs function to modify verbs and other adverbs and weaken a verb by qualifying it.  If I write “invariably weaken a verb…” I would have added nothing, except a spare word. 

A third tactic for limiting excess verbiage is eliminating passive voice.  Passive voice dispenses with a sentence’s explicit subject by using being verbs.  For example, “Politicians who advocate for tax reductions will be criticized.”  Criticized?  By whom?  King urges a bolder approach: “Bureaucrats criticize politicians who advocate for tax reductions.”  The latter sentence is braver because it puts a finger on who’s doing what!

King calls for courageous writing, not a succession of sentences that allow the author escape-hatches, which permit them to duck out of blame for saying something that a reader might not like. “I never said that the bureaucrats are a bunch of complainers.  I said that criticism happens or might happen when politicians advocate for tax reductions or even think about reductions.” 

Further, King states that writers don’t need to their vocabularies.  Deciphering complicated words takes the reader’s time.  King says, “Use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”[i]  He likens pretentious word use to dressing a pet in evening clothes.  It embarrasses both pet and owner.

Stephen King’s Brush with Death

The book ends with a twist. No surprise here.  The progress of On Writing stalled because King didn’t know what to do with the several idea threads that he had started but was unable to tie off. 

One afternoon during those days when King felt stuck on where to go with this book, he took a long walk on the quiet roads near his house.  Suddenly, a van, moving fast and swerving over the center line, came up over the crest of a rise in the roadway and struck the author.  

King’s injuries left him close to death, required care flight, multiple surgeries, physical therapy, and an extended time of recovery.  Finally, in pain and with the help of Tabatha, Stephen King was able to write again. 

The accident and King’s vivid narration in On Writing were as lurid as some of the passages in his books.  King doesn’t hesitate to name the van’s driver—Bryan Smith—and describe his sinister nonchalance at the accident scene when the two of them spent a long time together waiting for paramedics.

On Living and Writing

King wraps up modestly.  His accident and recovery made King thankful for the life he had lived and continues to live.  It isn’t money or fame that makes his life great.  Just being an author is good enough. It’s good because it enriches writer and reader alike.  And living in his old New England home with Tabatha and two generations of offspring makes Stephen King a contented man still able to come up with “situations” and develop them into the most entertainingly perverse stories that are out there.

And in a quiet way, he invites his reader, who has at this point devoured 250 pages of childhood memories and writing advice, to join him in the adventure.

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[i] King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue)) (p. 118). Scribner. Kindle Edition.