Stephen King: On Writing

 

When I’m writing, I think of myself as a castaway on a dessert island, looking for footprints, signs in the sky or the billowing smoke of a ship in the distance.  It’s a lonely existence.  Here’s the writer’s paradox:  my island, prison and liberation—they are all one and the same:  the library.  I live in a world entirely composed of books.

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For six months, I lost my library card.  And so that meant I had to use other people’s.  This meant that my prison and liberation were complicated—filled with the connivances of the beggar, the grifter and the confidence man.  “Hey, can you do me a little favor…” you sidle up to that friend almost as if he were a cat who at any moment may dart.  Then, you grab them and stroke them until they know there’s no escape.

 

Footprints

Getting people to lend you their card is a delicate procedure.  But yesterday—ahoy!—I found my card.  Oh, frabjous day!

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The first thing I borrowed was Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft—part memoir, part no-nonsense handbook on the nuts-and-bolts of yarn-concocting.  It was like finding footprints in the sand and knowing that I would encounter, at the end of the trail, a long lost friend.  This is the passage that resonated for me:

 

With the door shut, downloading what’s in my head directly to

the page, I write as fast as I can and still remain comfortable.

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult,

lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub.

There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.  If I write rapidly,

putting down my story exactly as it comes into my mind, only

looking back to check the names of my characters and the relevant

parts of their back stories, I find that I can keep up with my original

enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always

waiting to settle in.  (209 On Writing)

 

King gives himself 2 drafts and a polish.  He writes 2000 words a day, every day—that’s ten pages.  He usually writes until noon but doesn’t knock off until he finishes his word count. And he doesn’t take a day off, not because he’s some crazy workaholic (though he cops up to that) but because the story needs to be real and fresh and vivid.  Take just a little time off and the story gets stale.  That’s why it’s essential that he just write the story in his head without any revision, so he can keep the ball rolling.

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(I love that word, “downloading.”  Nowadays, I write like that—as quickly as possible to get down what’s coming at me.  Stephen King was a raging alcoholic and a coke addict, too.  When they staged an intervention, they rounded up all the baggies of white stuff and the coke spoons—many covered with mucous and blood—from his office.  He said his heart rate was up to 130 words a minute as he wrote.)

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Gold McDonald’s Coke Spoon:  For the Man Who Has Everything

King makes some allowances for the beginning writer.  You should write every day of the week, except one.  You should write 1000 words, not his pace of 2000.  But you should not go back, revise or fiddle until you’ve got the whole thing done.

OMG:  this is exactly what I’m doing.  Sometimes, you find things washed up on the beach of the mind and wonder if it was shaped by nature or if a divine hand put it there for you to find.  You hold it aloft before your savage eye and marvel at its beauty and meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 thoughts on “Stephen King: On Writing

  1. Khanh – Ah, words of wisdom from Stephen King. I think it’s always worthwhile to hear what other writers have to say about the craft – especially writers who have been successful. Wise of you I think to find out what other authors’ views are. And I feel for you about the whole library card thing. My library cards are precious to me…

    • Margot–I love to hear about what other writers have to say. One of the rare privileges I had, running a writer’s series was actually getting to talk to them and hear their advice, even if it was often contradictory. The writer Francine Prose told me that you can never teach Creative Writing and she would rather kill herself than deal with that kind of crazy; Lan Samantha Chang, who is the director of the MFA at University of Iowa, begged to differ. I felt like a cat on a perch, watching and waiting–everything interesting.

      Every writer brings to bear a different set of disciplines to their practice. And that’s the awesomeness of writing.

      I can tell you are a connoisseur of the library card, as you used the plural. My favorite library card is to the Getty Research Institute–high up on a hill with beautiful facilities–but there are no check-out privileges. I love that card, mainly because it gives me free parking, which is a big deal and a power trip in LA…

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