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On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Quotes
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I’d think ‘This isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going.’ Then I’d think ‘Half the world has the same idea.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It’s hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It was bad, but what in high school is not? At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems like the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
For years I dreamed of having the sort of massive oak slab that would dominate a room…
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
To write is human, to edit is divine.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It is completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut—it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring, ‘ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. 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. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The road to hell is paved with adverbs.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it… 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 shot ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of pre-meditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use ’emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’ and you’ll never say ‘John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion’ when you mean ‘John stopped long enough to take a shit’. If you believe ‘take a shit’ would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say ‘John stopped long enough to move his bowels’…
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
…it was another year or two before I discovered that drat and draft were different words. During that same period I remember believing that details were dentals and that a bitch was an extremely tall woman. A son of a bitch was apt to be a basketball player. When you’re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank” (27-8).
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right – as right as you can, anyway – it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. If you’re very lucky…more will want to do the former than the latter.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for one’s own pleasure, that fear may be mild — timidity is the word I’ve used here. If, however, one is working under deadline — a school paper, a newspaper article, the SAT writing sample — that fear may be intense.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
For me writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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?
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Words have weight.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
I’m not much of a believer in the so-called character story; I think that in the end, the story should always be the boss.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemny thoughtful.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The truth is that most writers are needy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
So okay― there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. … Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I’ve heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story…. Writing is seduction. Good talk is part of seduction.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Many writing texts caution against asking friends to read your stuff, suggesting you’re not apt to get a very unbiased opinion[.] … It’s unfair, according to this view, to put a pal in such a position. What happens if he/she feels he/she has to say, “I’m sorry, good buddy, you’ve written some great yarns in the past but this one sucks like a vacuum cleaner”?The idea has some validity, but I don’t think an unbiased opinion is exactly what I’m looking for. And I believe that most people smart enough to read a novel are also tactful enough to find a gentler mode of expression than “This sucks.” (Although most of us know that “I think this has a few problems” actually means “This sucks, ” don’t we?)
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why 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 also 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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
At its most basic we are only discussing a learned skill, but do we not agree that sometimes the most basic skills can create things far beyond our expectations? We are talking about tools and carpentry, about words and style…but as we move along, you’d do well to remember that we are also talking about magic.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It’s worked! Our marriage has outlasted all of the world leaders, except for Castro. And if we keep talking, arguing, making love and dancing to the Ramones- it’ll probably keep working.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. …this book…is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
A boy who once wiped his ass with poison ivy probably doesn’t belong in a smart people’s club.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, “Oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I’d like to think I’ve done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can’t decide what you should do next.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
We see her go through dangerous mood-swings, but I tried never to come right out and say “Annie was depressed and possibly suicidal that day” or “Annie seemed particularly happy that day.”If I have to tell you, I lose. If, on the other hand, I can show you a silent, dirty-haired woman who compulsively gobbles cake and candy, then have you draw the conclusion that Annie is in the depressive part of a manic-depressive cycle, I win.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The word is only a representation of the meaning, even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You try to tell yourself that you’ve been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it’s true. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s all. Then you cry.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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 or 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.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page.
— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
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