On Writing

🤔 Impressions

Awesome book! I was never a fan of Stephen King, not personal, I’m just not into creepy reading. But this book is changing my mind, inspiring me to explore his other work.
It is what every aspiring writer needs, one might come back to it yearly, for some part of the book.

⭐️ Rating: 5/5

📖 Dictionary – New Words

• Resplendent: Attractive and impressive through being richely colorful or sumptuous.
• Behooves: A duty or responsibility for someone to do something.
• Galumphing: Moving in a clumsy or noisy manner, inelegent.
• Dirigible: Capable of being steered, guided, or directed.
• Demurring: Raise doubts or objections or show reluctance.

📔Notes

Part 1 – C.V.

Two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize when they show up. (P.37)

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main jo is taking out all the things that are not the story.” Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it. (P.57)

The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position. (P.78)

Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around. (P.101)

Part 2 – What Writing Is: Toolbox

I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your won toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead od looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work. (P.114)

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary. In this case, you can happily pack what you have without the slightest bit of guilt and inferiority. As the whore said to the bashful sailor, “It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it.” (P.114)

[Talking about a writer’s toolbox] 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. (P.117)

Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. (P.118)

You’ll also want grammar on the top of your toolbox. (P.118) – Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition.

Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense. (P.122)

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. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. (P.124)

[About the toolbox’s level] On the layer beneath go those elements of style. (P.129)

(…) we ought to think for a moment about the paragraph, the form of organization which comes after the sentence. (P.129)

Part 3 – On Writing

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, gracefull narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. (P.146)

“read a lot, write a lot” (P.151)

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. (P.157)

Write what you like, the imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your won personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationship, sex and work. Especially work. People love to read about work. God knows why, byt they do. (P.161)

What you know makes you unique in some other way. be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story. (P.162)

In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which created a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech. (P.163)

I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them, of course). If you can see things this way (or at least try to), we can work together comfortably. (P.163)

Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered per-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground. (P.163)

The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as What-if questions. (P.169)

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to.

You can learn only by doing. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. (P.173)

Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. (P.174)

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. (P.179)

The harder you try to be clear and simple, the more you will learn about the complexity of our American dialect. It be slippery, precious; aye, it be very slippery, indeed. Practice the art, always reminding yourself that your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story. (P.180)

(…) and one of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us, instead. (P.180)

Basic aspects of good storytelling (…) that practice is invaluable (and should feel good, really not like practice at all) and that honesty is indispensable. Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity (and without using a lot of tiresome, unnecessary adverbs). (P.195)

You can’t please all of the readers all of the time; you can’t please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the time. (P.196)

Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create a sense of artificial profundity. None of the bells and whistles are about story, all right? Only story is about story. (…) Symbolism (and the other adornments, too) does serve a useful purpose, though (…) It can serve as a focusing device for both you and your reader, helping to create a more unified and pleasing work. (…) you’ll see if symbolism, or the potential for it, exists. If it doesn’t leave well enough alone. (P.200)

[On theme] I was astounded at how really useful “thematic thinking” turned out to be. (…) something like magnifying glass. (…) ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I’m writing about (…) (P.207)

But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions. To do less is to rob your work (and eventually your readers) of the vision that makes each tale you write uniquely your own. (P.208)

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. (P.209)

There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. If I write rapidly, putting down my story exactly as it comes into mind, (…). I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always waiting to settle in. The first draft — the All-Story Draft — should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. (P.209)

My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don’t lower it by exposing what you’ve written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be. (P.210)

Your mind and imagination —two things which are related, but not really the same — have to recycle themselves, at least in regard to this one particular work. My advice is that you take a couple of days off — go fishing, go kayaking, do a jigsaw puzzle — and then go to work on something else. Something shorter, preferably, and something that’s a complete change of direction and pace from newly finished book. (P.211)

How long you let your book rest (…) is entirely up to you, but I think it should be a minimum of six weeks. During this time your manuscript will be safely shut away in a desk, drawer, aging and (one hopes) mellowing. Resist temptation. (P.211)

Sit down with your door shut (you’ll be opening it to the world soon enough), a pencil in your hand, and a legal pad by your side. Then read your manuscript over. Do it all in one sitting, if that’s possible (…) Make all the notes you want, but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs, like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies. (P.212)

It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darling that it to kill your own. (P.213)

And listen—if you spot a few of these big holes, you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us. (P.213)

[On writing length] Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10% (P.222)

you’ll still have to deal with the first forty years of the guy’s life at some point. How much and how well you deal with those years will have a lot to do with the level of success your story achieves. (P.225)

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. (P.227)