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A review by savaging
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
2.0
A lot of people recommend this book, even if your writing is worlds away from King's kind. Because whatever your style, if you're a writer you have to produce something on the page and get that page into the hands of readers, an activity with which King has plenty of experience. This book explains things like how to get an agent, and you ain't gonna find that in those hippy-dippy edge-of-insanity writing manuals/prose-poems.
But King's work is so far from what moves me that I found his how-tos almost incomprehensible. Get this: King begins his manuscript at the beginning of a story, and writes ten pages a day until he arrives at the end (which happens within three months). Beginning to end? Yes, beginning to end. And then, he does a "second draft," which mostly involves copy-editing, taking out a phrase here and there, insert a detail or two.
But aren't second drafts the utterly different story you write after shredding your fragile, cobbled-together first draft? King begins the book with the complaint that readers never ask popular-book writers about the language, but what about the language? All he has is the diatribe against adverbs and a cheer for proper grammar. The kind of speed which he recommends in the craft of writing doesn't seem to leave a tremendous amount of room for the art of it.
I know, I know -- any disagreement I have with King is much to my detriment. It's embarrassing -- I'm piddling around while this person is racking up more bestsellers. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way he writes, or the way he is encouraging other people to write. More Successful Authors with vapid books which sell by the boatload.
But King's work is so far from what moves me that I found his how-tos almost incomprehensible. Get this: King begins his manuscript at the beginning of a story, and writes ten pages a day until he arrives at the end (which happens within three months). Beginning to end? Yes, beginning to end. And then, he does a "second draft," which mostly involves copy-editing, taking out a phrase here and there, insert a detail or two.
But aren't second drafts the utterly different story you write after shredding your fragile, cobbled-together first draft? King begins the book with the complaint that readers never ask popular-book writers about the language, but what about the language? All he has is the diatribe against adverbs and a cheer for proper grammar. The kind of speed which he recommends in the craft of writing doesn't seem to leave a tremendous amount of room for the art of it.
I know, I know -- any disagreement I have with King is much to my detriment. It's embarrassing -- I'm piddling around while this person is racking up more bestsellers. But that doesn't mean I have to like the way he writes, or the way he is encouraging other people to write. More Successful Authors with vapid books which sell by the boatload.