Customer Reviews
advice from the master
This book is as close to chatting with Stephen King as most of us will ever get. It's part biography--and a fascinating one at that-- King's childhood was NOT one you'd want for yourself and looking back on it, it's no wonder that he writes horror today. It's an honest look at his joys, and sorrows and his former addictions. The second half of the book is purely about writing and it sometimes goes wildly against the advice you may have gotten from your Fiction 101 college course. King talks about inspiration, magic, genius and tells the brutal truth about bad writers. He charms, infuriates and challenges. I have read this book several times and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to be a writer. My only quible is the quality of this paperback. It's fine if you are only going to read the book once or twice but if you intend to use it as a manual you'd be better off buying the hardback or the more expensive but sturdier quality paperback edition.
Kimberley Lindsay Wilson
Stephen King talks about writing, reading and other things
This is really not so much a book about writing as it is a conversation. Whenever Stephen King writes in his own voice, whether it is the foreword or afterward to one of his novels, an essay, or whatever, there is always a strong conversational element, and that is what exactly what you find when you read "On Writing." It is also a book about reading as well and there are also autobiographical elements that take on a life of their own and make you forget they are intended as pivotal episodes in King's realization that he was born to write (as far as I am concerned, he can never talk enough about Tabby). This latter part takes up the first part of the book and then King turns to the specifics of his craft, detailing the necessary items a writer needs to have in their "Toolbox" and then talking about the lessons he has learned that he wants to pass along.
...he traces back over the superhighway of his own career. If you are looking for a step-by-step process that will lead to fame and fortune, then you need to look elsewhere. There are suggestions, helpful hints and even one actual to go assignment (that you can take or leave), but "On Writing" is still a pleasant conversation with one of the most successful novelists in the history of the written word and not an instructional manual dolling out detailed information that will be covered on a comprehensive final exam.
In the end, I think you will discover that King achieves the two most important goals of anyone attempting to "teach" writer. First, he will convince you that you WANT to write and that all those impulses knocking through your brain are pretty much the same collection of euphoric thoughts and dastardly doubts with which King is all too familiar. Second, he will convince you that you CAN write, that there are simple truths that writers can take as being self-evident. One thing that is also clear by the time you finishing reading this book is that King wrote it as much for his own benefit as he did for those of his reader. The reason for that, for those of you too involved in reading and/or writing to catch the news from a few years back, is explained in the book's postscript.
The final thing I learned from this book was that if you ever hit somebody with your car, it had better not be a writer. Even if you hit somebody who can go get a good lawyer who will take from you everything you own in court all they can do is rail against you so long and so hard that it will dawn on the jury that while you might be a wretched human being you are probably not one step removed from Hitler. But a writer can strip you naked before the world with a few choice sentences. William Wallace fared better when put to death by Edward Longhshanks than does the man who ran down Stephen King.
Like a school book, but way more fun!
Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, is probably the best advice book you're goin to get.
It has three parts:
(1)An account on his younger life, and why he thinks he came to be the type of writer she is today.
(2)The second part is an absolutely fantastic account on writing. He runs you through Plot Development, Character development, different types of plot eg: Story/Situation, advice on Literary Agents, submitting short-stories to magazines etc etc etc...
(3)And the last 60 pages or so is an account on the horrifying accident he had in 1999 in Maine. He walks through it in detail.
As an aspiring writer myself, I found this book classic. When I think back to before, when I didnt read it - and was writing myself - If found that I really needed it.
So, for anyone who wants to know the low-down on becoming a successful writer, buy the book; for anyone who is a fan this is a must, you will read exciteing stories about his childhood and later life, and read the explicit chapter on his horrible accident.
King, at his best. :-)(-:
