In one sentence
Writing is a practical craft strengthened by heavy reading, sustained practice, honest revision, and attention to story rather than mystique. King’s memoir supplies the evidence and emotional force for that view: writing is both work and a way of being fully alive.
Overview
The book has three major movements: a selective memoir of King’s childhood, early writing, rejection, teaching, and emergence as a novelist; a compact discussion of the writer’s “toolbox”; and a practical account of drafting and revising fiction. It concludes with the 1999 accident that nearly killed him and his return to writing during recovery. The result is deliberately part life story, part craft manual—not a comprehensive theory of fiction.
Core ideas
Demystify the vocation
King presents writing less as a calling granted to special people than as skilled labor performed repeatedly. Talent matters, but it becomes useful only through practice, endurance, and a willingness to tolerate rejection and mediocre early work.
Read a lot; write a lot
His central training model is immersion plus output: reading develops an instinct for what works, while writing converts that instinct into usable skill. The advice is simple, but its implied standard is demanding—regular practice over sporadic inspiration.
Build the writer’s toolbox
King treats vocabulary, grammar, paragraphing, and style as tools rather than status markers. Use the words you naturally possess, prefer clarity over ornamental language, and strengthen weak fundamentals through reading and revision.
Prefer situation and character to elaborate plotting
He favors beginning with a compelling situation and allowing characters’ choices to generate consequences. This can produce discovery and vitality, but it also requires later shaping; “letting the story grow” is not the same as refusing to revise.
Plain prose carries more force
King distrusts inflated diction, unnecessary adverbs, throat-clearing, and passive constructions when they obscure agency. His ideal prose is direct, concrete, and reader-friendly—not simplistic, but economical enough that the story remains visible.
Draft privately, revise honestly
The first draft is for discovering what the story is; revision is for making the discovered story clearer and stronger. He recommends distance between drafting and revision, then assessing what can be cut, clarified, or made more truthful.
Write for an ideal reader
An imagined trusted reader gives revision a human target. The device helps replace abstract worries about “the audience” with a concrete question: where will this person become bored, confused, or emotionally disengaged?
Writing is connected to recovery and living
The accident narrative reframes writing as more than career ambition. Returning to the work becomes part of King’s physical and psychological recovery, supporting the book’s broader claim that creative practice can organize a life.
Practical takeaways
- Establish a repeatable writing routine rather than waiting for motivation.
- Read outside your preferred genre to enlarge your sense of voice, structure, and possibility.
- During drafting, protect momentum; during revision, become more skeptical and exacting.
- Cut explanations that the scene, character, or context already communicates.
- Treat grammar and punctuation as tools for controlling emphasis, pace, and meaning.
- Use a concrete reader or “ideal reader” to test clarity and interest.
- Separate advice about craft from advice about King’s personal process; imitate principles, not necessarily his schedule or method.
- Keep rejection and slow progress in proportion: they are normal features of a writing life, not decisive evidence of inability.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The book is strongest as an articulate account of one writer’s practice and temperament, not as a universal curriculum. King’s success, genre, audience, and unusual productivity make some prescriptions difficult to generalize.
- Its advocacy of situation, character, and discovery may understate the value of outlining, research, formal experimentation, or deliberate structural planning for other writers.
- The prose advice emphasizes clarity and economy, but literary fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and experimental work may require opacity, heightened style, or rule-breaking.
- The memoir is selective and shaped for instruction; it should not be treated as a complete autobiography or neutral history of King’s career.
- The 2020 twentieth-anniversary edition includes contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King, so contents may vary slightly from the original 2000 edition.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which of King’s principles describe writing in general, and which mainly describe commercial narrative fiction?
- Would my work improve more from increased reading, increased drafting, or more rigorous revision right now?
- Where am I using complexity to create genuine effect, and where am I hiding uncertainty behind it?
- What would my ideal reader misunderstand, skip, or wish were shorter?
- Which parts of my process should be modeled on King’s principles rather than his personal habits?
Return to this when…
Return to this book when writing feels mystical, overplanned, or stalled by fear of rejection. Revisit the toolbox discussion before revising prose, and the memoir/recovery sections when you need a reminder that sustained creative work is built through ordinary effort rather than dramatic inspiration.
Highlights
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.
I’m not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly; I’m not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside your sense of humor (please God you have one). This isn’t a popularity contest, it’s not the moral Olympics, and it’s not church. But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else.
Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. (You’ll be doing that as you read, of course … but that comes later.) 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. 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.
Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.
The timid fellow writes The meeting will be held at seven o’clock because that somehow says to him, “Put it this way and people will believe you really know.” Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write The meeting’s at seven. There, by God! Don’t you feel better?
I won’t say there’s no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although “was carried” and “was placed” still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don’t embrace them. What I would embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa.
Two pages of the passive voice—just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction—make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man—who farted, right? A simpler way to express this idea—sweeter and more forceful, as well—might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it. I’m not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we’re out of that awful passive voice. You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it’s broken up into two thoughts.
And remember: The writer threw the rope, not The rope was thrown by the writer. Please oh please.
The other piece of advice I want to give you before moving on to the next level of the toolbox is this: The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind.
Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if firmly really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you’ll get no argument from me … but what about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone
Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.
Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation.
ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.
I’ll be as encouraging as possible, because it’s my nature and because I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well—settle back into competency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on.
My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time. Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people.
That was a lie. I told them that because if you agree to an interview you have to say something, and it plays better if it’s something at least half-clever. Also, I didn’t want to sound like a workaholic dweeb (just a workaholic, I guess). The truth is that when I’m writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not. That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday (at my age you try to ignore your goddam birthday anyway). And when I’m not working, I’m not working at all, although during those periods of full stop I usually feel at loose ends with myself and have trouble sleeping. For me, not working is the real work. When I’m writing, it’s all the playground, and the worst three hours I ever spent there were still pretty damned good.
Still, 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, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave during a period of severe sunspot activity. 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. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.
resort—Truman Capote said he did his best work in motel rooms, but he is an exception; most of us do our best in a place of our own. Until you get one, you’ll find your new resolution to write a lot hard to take seriously. Your writing room doesn’t have to sport a Playboy Philosophy decor, and you don’t need an Early American rolltop desk in which to house your writing implements. I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and ’Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs; John Cheever reputedly wrote in the basement of his Park Avenue apartment building, near the furnace. The space can be humble (probably should be, as I think I have already suggested), and it really needs only one thing: a door which you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business; you have made a serious commitment to write and intend to walk the walk as well as talk the talk.
I think we’re actually talking about creative sleep. Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule—in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk—exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night
But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well. The longer you keep to these basics, the easier the act of writing will become. Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.
The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way. In some instances, the outcome is what I visualized. In most, however, it’s something I never expected. For a suspense novelist, this is a great thing.
For me, good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else. In most cases, these details will be the first ones that come to mind. Certainly they will do for a start. If you decide later on that you’d like to change, add, or delete, you can do so—it’s what rewrite was invented for.
When it comes to scene-setting and all sorts of description, a meal is as good as a feast.
He ran like a madman, she was pretty as a summer day, the guy was a hot ticket, Bob fought like a tiger … don’t waste my time (or anyone’s) with such chestnuts. It makes you look either lazy or ignorant. Neither description will do your reputation as a writer much good.
My all-time favorite similes, by the way, come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include “It was darker than a carload of assholes” (George V. Higgins) and “I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief” (Raymond Chandler). The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.
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. And if I am able, even briefly, to give you a Wilkes’-eye-view of the world—if I can make you understand her madness—then perhaps I can make her someone you sympathize with or even identify with. The result? She’s more frightening than ever, because she’s close to real. If, on the other hand, I turn her into a cackling old crone, she’s just another pop-up bogeylady. In that case I lose bigtime, and so does the reader.
should close this little sermonette with a word of warning—starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction. Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story. The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm the story idea may indeed have come first; if I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him). But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions.
If you’re a beginner, though, let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open. 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 a 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. This first draft—the All-Story Draft—should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you’re doing to a close friend (very often the close friend you think of first is the one who shares your bed), either because you’re proud of what you’re doing or because you’re doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse.
During that reading, the top part of my mind is concentrating on story and toolbox concerns: knocking out pronouns with unclear antecedents (I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal-injury lawyer), adding clarifying phrases where they seem necessary, and of course, deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with (never all of them; never enough). Underneath, however, I’m asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme? I’m asking myself What’s it all about, Stevie, in other words, and what I can do to make those underlying concerns even clearer. What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader’s mind (and heart) after he or she has closed the book and put it up on the shelf.
When I’ve finished reading and making all my little anal-retentive revisions, it’s time to open the door and show what I’ve written to four or five close friends who have indicated a willingness to look. Someone—I can’t remember who, for the life of me— once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this. I think that every novelist has a single ideal reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is thinking, “I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?” For me that first reader is my wife, Tabitha.
Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings).
been—I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft - 10%. Good luck.” I wish I could remember who wrote that note—Algis Budrys, perhaps. Whoever it was did me a hell of a favor. I copied the formula out on a piece of shirt-cardboard and taped it to the wall beside my typewriter. Good things started to happen for me shortly after.
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. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.
research is back story, and the key word in back story is back. The tale I have to tell in Buick Eight has to do with monsters and secrets. It is not a story about police procedure in western Pennsylvania. What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal.
When you step away from the “write what you know” rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first.
There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after awhile, then a little faster still. My hip still hurt, my back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I started to get on top of them. There was no sense of exhilaration, no buzz—not that day—but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good. I’d gotten going, there was that much. The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
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.
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.
Ah, here is the lucky Hawaiian shirt. It shows up in the first draft, but not until about page thirty. That’s too late for an important prop, so I stuck it up front. 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; if the main character’s lucky Hawaiian shirt plays a part at the end of a story, it must be introduced early. Otherwise it looks like a deus ex machina (which of course it is).