Stephen King's On Writing

I was fifteen when Stephen King released On Writing. A friend of mine named Damien, who was working with me in the dish room of a steakhouse at the time, handed off his copy to me. I had never read a book on writing. I've since read several. This and Annie Dillard's Writing Life are the only ones I've ever returned to.

There's nothing nuts-and-bolts groundbreaking in here about writing as a craft, but what endures is King's demonstration that writing for writers is so enmeshed in their lives out of habit that it, second only to reading, registers for them as something all-consuming.

Something I asked myself while rereading On Writing this time is whether it would have gotten published without King's brand name. Maybe in fact it wouldn't have. But thank goodness it did. The imperfections of the book speak to the paradoxes of the writing life.

Take this howler, for instance. King writes that life is not a support system for writing but the other way around, and yet every extract he provides from his life evidences the opposite. He certainly doesn't live like writing isn't all there is.

Reading this book as a teenager, I took King's advice on writing extremely seriously.

By his own accounts, King writes 2,000 words a day. Elsewhere I've heard him say he does six pages a day, which amounts to the same thing: a whole lot of work. But for him, it's a simple formula. Work like this and you have the draft of a book in three months.

For those just starting the habit of writing, he advises a goal that is slightly more modest: try for 1,000 words a day and take weekends and holidays off.

Did I try this method as a fifteen-year-old? You bet I did. Did I get very far? No, not very far. But by trying the method, really trying anything, I discovered writing as a creative outlet. The first time was when my younger brother was in the hospital for a prolonged sickness. I started writing a sci-fi story while my mother and I were at my brother's bedside.

I think my friend Damien from the steakhouse was as enamored by King's advice as I was. As far as I can remember, he took up writing because of this book, first fiction and then other things. Last I had checked (and it has been a while since I checked), he was writing political philosophy. Which is fiction, too, in a way.