Thankfully, I was careful, so I didn’t get ensnared in the trap of rave reviews, what actually got me was the very title of this book. King is certainly one of the most prolific, if not the best, living writers. But his On Writing - A Memoir on Craft holds some serious lessons for aspiring authors, I daresay, across genre. Here King attempts to make his mark on a different level; exploring a side of him that authors usually keep to themselves. He lets out his secret recipe and that too with an unusual frankness.
In the foreword, King shares an anecdote with the reader, which he claims has galvanized him to write this book. He was once having dinner with Amy Tan, the acclaimed novelist. In the middle of the conversation, he casually asked her if there is any question she expects her fans to ask her in Q-A sessions, but was never asked. “Amy paused; thinking it over very carefully,” writes King, “and then said: ‘No one ever asks about the language.’”
The reply is a classic lament of popular novelists. "They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don’t ask popular novelists.“ mourns King. So in a way, King wrote this book to debunk the entrenched myth that popular authors are pure dopes when it comes to the art of writing. And he succeeds.
The book is partly memoir and mainly a fascinating commentary on the art of writing. The autobiographical part is no less important because here King shares anecdotes from his childhood, the circumstances and environment that lead to his first big break with Carrie in 1974 and later the road accident that nearly killed him. The chapters dealing with his writing wisdom are carefully sandwiched in the middle.
King worships William Strunk’s Element of Style. And in the first few pages on his thoughts about style he, more or less, paraphrases the Rules from the classic style guide with numerous examples that impel one to get down to the basics again. He spends a good number of pages expressing his disgust for adverbs, specially “Tom Swifties“; and recommends ways to avoid them.
Of the writing process, King stresses hard on discipline. He claims to maintain a two-thousand-words-per-day goal for himself; and suggests budding writers to begin with a target of thousand words a day, at least.
He discusses, at length, issues that budding writers working on their first drafts face, and recommends, among other things, a formula that he follows: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. In words, weed out the unnecessary parts, trim trim and trim.
Like a generous teacher, in the later part of the book, King adds a sample first draft of one of his unpublished short stories, and then an edited final version of the same, to provide a clear example as to how he edits his work. Finally, he attaches a long list of books, mostly fiction, at the end, that he read in the last couple of years and found “interesting and amusing”.
On Writing – A Memoir of Craft can be seen as a detailed answer sheet to the questions that pop up in the minds of every struggling writer who are enchanted by a prolific master like Stephen King. It not only answers most of the questions regarding the craft of writing but does it with an honesty that’s rear.
If I am asked to find out one sentence that sums up the book, I think it would be this: “If you want to be a writer”, says King with finality, “you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
