Five Writing Tips from Stephen King We Should Never Forget

This summer I will be attending the Writing and Illustrating for Young Readers conference in Sandy, Utah. My instructor for the week long intensive course, author Carol Lynch Williams, sent her students a mile long list of books to read in advance. One of the books on our list is Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

I'd read it before, but this time I purchased my own copy of the book and went through it with a highlighter. Here are five gems of advice he gives to aspiring authors that we all need to remember.  

1. "I believe the first draft of a book-- even a long one-- should take no more than three months, the length of a season. Any longer and-- for me, at least-- the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel."

Even the best stories get old if they drag on and never end. I can't imagine working on the first draft of a novel for year or more, but it happens to people all the time. If it drags on that long, it's not really a work in progress anymore-- it's in cold storage.

First drafts are painful, uncertain, and grueling. The beginning chapters are always written in high emotion for me as I'm caught up in the excitement of a fresh story, but eventually you hit a point when it is just plain hard work to keep going. What I'm finding more and more is that amateur writers tend to put their writing aside when they get to this point, and I refuse to be an amateur anymore. King recommends writing 2,000 words a day, but but challenges more timid beginning writers to achieve at least 1,000 words. I can do that. 1,000 words is roughly five pages each day. That's within my grasp. It doesn't have to be perfect the first time through, it just has to get done. To become professionals, we have to work like professionals.

2. "Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.  ...In fiction, the paragraph is less structured-- it's the beat instead of the actual melody. The more fiction you read and write, the more you'll find your paragraphs forming on their own. And that's what you want."

I love playing with paragraph structure as I write. Sometimes I get a little "paragraph happy" if you will. Realizing that this is something I need to watch and be aware of in my writing, it's fun to have permission to experiment. For me, paragraphs play a key role in the development of the voice and mood of each piece.

3. "The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ...Writing is seduction."

This is a quote I need to read every time my inner grammar nazi threatens to stall out a manuscript. I'm writing for the sake of a good story, and my purpose should not be to impress my fellow English teacher grammarians or former college professors. Don't get me wrong, that would be nice. You know what would be even better? If those individuals become so wrapped up in my book that they forget to look at the grammar and structure and are instead swept away by a good story told well.

4. "...while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one."

Does this sentence discourage you? It shouldn't. It means that while our work might not ever be studied in universities alongside Milton or Shakespeare, if you have a bit of talent you can still have reasonable hope of becoming a good writer someday. That's comforting to me on days when the quality of my work is the same as if a horse has just "dropped a load" on my keyboard.

5. "Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work. ...What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not."

We hear all the time to "write what you know" as authors. Too many people interpret this to mean that they should only write about characters who are,in essence, the author with a different name. I don't know about you, but the last thing I want to write about is someone who knows all the same things I do. Part of the fun of reading and writing is getting to escape into someone else's life. Write what is exciting and enjoyable to you. If you have to spend hours in a library or doing interviews, even attending a few classes, it won't feel like work because you will be having fun. Then use your prior experiences and knowledge about life to enrich the story. I could hug Stephen King for making this statement.

There was so much valuable advice in his novel that I could never summarize it all in a single blog post, but these were the five that stood out most to me. What advice about writing or the writing process inspires you? I'd love to hear about it.