Home > Work > On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
21 " When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest. "
― Stephen King , On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
22 " If you're just starting out as a writer, you could do worse than strip your television's electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea. "
23 " The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor. "
24 " I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh. "
25 " Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she put down thinking: I can do better than this. Hell, I am doing better than this! What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? "
26 " You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair ... Come to it any way but lightly. "
27 " Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. "
28 " The rest of it - and perhaps the best of it - is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you're brave enough to start, you will. "
29 " One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. "
30 " I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity. "
31 " As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me. "
32 " Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing. "
33 " Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it. "
34 " I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. "
35 " It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. "
36 " Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest. "
37 " The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. "
38 " Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity. "
39 " There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true. "
40 " It seems to occur to few of the attendees [of a writing retreat] that if you have a feel you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class. "