Writing is refined thinking. Like a magnifying glass collecting light only to hone it to a sharp point, the act of writing allows you to hone your thoughts and stories to a keen edge. The ability to write well is an advantage in any walk of life – there is magic in being able to weave a story that has the reader fascinated.
At its best, writing can both move people and transport them. A common thread successful people share across fields is the ability to tell compelling stories that grab people’s attention. As novelist Richard Powers puts it:
“The best arguments in the world won’t change a single person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”
Most people believe that teaching someone how to write is like teaching fish how to swim. I don’t subscribe to that notion. Thankfully neither does Stephen King. In his part memoir, part workshop “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft”, King believes that while it is impossible to make someone a writing genius, with enough dedication and help, a competent writer can become a good one.
You could say SK (or “The King of Horror”, as fans and the media refer to him) knows a thing or two about writing. For almost half a century, he has written books with amazing regularity. And not just any books. His books have sold over 350 million copies, and most have never been out of print. More than 60 movies have been commissioned based on his works – including some iconic ones like The Shining, Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption. This is a creative well that does not run dry, and I was sure that such regularity could not be a function of just talent. It requires a dedication to the craft and a sharpening of the tools.
Thankfully, in this book SK covers what he has learned over the years – a masterclass before the concept became popular. While most of his concepts relate to fiction, there is a lot here for any budding writer.
Becoming a (good) writer
First, let’s get this out of the way: There is no shortcut to becoming a good writer. There is no central idea dump, no Ikea for Authors, where writers get their ideas. A good story can come from anywhere – you only need to be open to inspiration.
By reading and writing regularly, you create opportunities for this serendipity to occur.
A passion for reading and writing is at the core of one’s journey to becoming a good writer. If you are unwilling to spend four to six hours a day, every day, reading and writing without distraction, you are unlikely to develop the skills and temperament required to be a writer, and most of what follows would be as helpful to you as arm floaters for a lifeguard who cannot swim.
The only way for a writer to grow is to persevere, even in the face of rejection or anonymity.
King started writing at an early age – his mom was his first paying audience. But that’s not to say he found success early. King used to write horror stories and send them out to magazines – and keep the rejection slips on a nail pegged to his desk. By the time he was 14, the nails could no longer support the weight. So, he replaced it with a spike and kept on writing. He never let the weight of rejection or not finding an audience bother him, but he took any feedback from these rejection slips to improve his writing.
By the time his first book was finally published, King was married with three kids, held a job teaching at school and living out of a trailer. And he did not make serious money from it until it went for a paperback reprint a year later. The key is, he was still writing 4-6 hours a day in the laundry room of the trailer, the only place in his home where he could find some privacy.
What helped him was having a support system in his mother and then his wife to tide over rejections and lean on as sounding boards for ideas, plots and drafts.
“Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
According to SK, the key to writing well is to let your feelings fuel it, be it joy, anger, sadness, curiosity or even despair. The stronger this emotional fuel, the more powerful your writing will be and more likely to sustain over time.
The Toolbox for Writing
King proposes a few tools you need to write well. I call these the bricks and the scaffolding of writing. There are two types of bricks you need to build the structure of your prose. The first is vocabulary and the second is grammar.
Many people get the concept of vocab wrong – becoming a good writer is not about building a large lexicon of fungible confabulations (see what I did there 🙈) but making the best of what you have. The worst thing you can do is to dress up your writing and use large words that get in the way of your story. The basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, as long as it is appropriate and colourful. If you spend enough time (or open google), you can always come up with another word. But that first word is likely to be the closest in meaning to what you want to say.
The second brick that you need to build your writing is grammar. Most of us have a mental block for grammar largely stemming from what (and how) it was taught at school. In any event, if you don’t know any grammar and are incapable of grasping it, writing is not for you. But if you are inclined to spend some effort to revise and refresh what you probably already know, grammar can be the thread that strings together the pearls of your story. Some time spent in the company of Wren and Martin will no doubt brush up most of what you need.
The fear that their reader will not understand or appreciate their work is one of the most significant reasons people fail at these two basics of the language. It’s why they use complex vocab when simple will do, use too many words when one will do, or too many adverbs when none is needed. A second draft is usually critical to identify and correct these in your writing.
The final piece in the toolbox, the scaffolding that holds together the other pieces, is your style. A great place to get a basic grounding on what style means can be found in Elements of Style by Strunk and White, which is widely and readily available. Your style depends not only on your own personal writing traits but also on the topic. For example, an easy fiction book contains easy, spread out paragraphs, while heavy non-fiction books tend to have a more dense, packed look. However, no matter what you are writing, the basic structure of the paragraph should remain the same – a sentence on the topic and a few lines to explain or amplify it.
In fiction, of course, one can tend to move away from this sometimes; the purpose of fiction, after all, is not grammatical correctness. However, there is danger in losing the structure completely as it makes it harder for the reader to keep track of the story. You want the reader to focus on the story rather than figuring out where one idea/para began and ended.
The final element of style is the length of the book/blog/story itself – it tells the writer about the commitment that the author made to complete the work and the commitment the reader must also give to complete it.
The Writing Process
In the movie Ratatouille, the famous chef Gusteau had a quote that the protagonist takes to heart – “Anyone can cook.” It is only at the end of the movie that the meaning becomes clear: Not everyone can become a great cook, but a great cook can come from anywhere. This same dichotomy lies at the heart of writing. Having all the tools in your toolbox is necessary but not sufficient to make you a good writer. The greatest writers are born with an innate sense of imagination and prose that can rarely be taught. But, with enough dedication and help, anyone become a good writer.
The first step in that journey starts with reading and writing a lot – there is just no way around it. If you don’t have the time to read and write, you don’t have the time to build the tools you need to write. First of all, the more you read, the more you learn about writing – style, character development, dialogues, etc. Secondly, the more you read, the more ideas you get about what to write yourself. If you are not reading and writing four to six hours a day, it will be hard for you to become a good writer.
SK has a clear process for writing developed over decades of honing his craft: two drafts and a polish. Once he starts writing the first draft of a book, he rarely slows. When an idea is new and fresh, we have the maximum motivation to write about it. As soon as it starts getting older, doubts grow, and our interest is drawn to other things. It is important to keep the pace and even move forward with some gaps you can come back to later.
The first draft is what he calls “writing with a closed door.” This is when you are transferring what is in your head to the paper. At this time, you don’t need any distraction – or help. The idea is to write rapidly and get your story down on paper. The time to polish it will come later. King makes sure he writes at least 2000 words a day in this phase – you may have a lower limit, but try and enforce one.
Once you are done with the first draft, it’s time to take a well-deserved break. Your brain needs a rest and change. If you want to write something at this time, try a change of pace. King recommends a minimum of six weeks to come back to the draft, though it could be as low as 3-4 days for blogs and other short-form stuff. Regardless of when you come back to the work, you want to be able to look at it with a fresh perspective.
In the second draft, you make small changes such as spell-check, grammar, etc. but also zoom out to look at the larger picture. This is also the time when you check your work for logical inconsistency, plot holes, flawed character development or loose ends that you need to make more extensive edits for. You also keep an eye out for themes and styles that are developing and need to be reinforced. Ideally, your story becomes tighter with this second cut, especially if you avoid the temptation to add more stuff. One feedback King received early in his career and suggests for all writers: Second Draft = First Draft – 10%.
Once the changes are done, now is the time to finally share your work with 4-5 close friends for feedback. You need to share it with people who have the capability and the intent to give you genuine feedback. You don’t need to make every change that is suggested – send your book/blog to five people, and you are likely to get five different feedback, and in such cases, the writer can continue with his vision. But if all or a large subset of people come back with the same suggestion, you need to g0 back to the drawing board.
The Key Ingredients of Fiction
When writing fiction, there are a few moving parts that the author needs to take care of. Unlike many authors, SK doesn’t believe in creating a skeletal plot as the basis of the story. His style is to put characters in a situation and use the triple devices of narrative, description and dialogue to move the story forward
- Narration is what moves the story along from Point A to Point B. It can essentially be boiled down to a situation and how a cast of characters reacts to it. Most situations can, in turn, be boiled down to a “what if” question. What if an ordinary boy finds out that he is actually a wizard (Harry Potter)? Narration fleshes out these basic premises into stories as the situation develops.
- Description is what makes the reader a part of the story and makes them get involved. It is not only about how you describe but also how much. You want the reader to even forget that he is reading – a good description is what makes that happen. You want to leave at least some part of the imagination open to the reader if you want him to become involved in the story. Too descriptive, and it will be hard for him to identify with it. Too little, and you fail to build the atmosphere and confuse the reader. This is why description is a learned skill and gets better the more you read and write.
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
- Dialogue, or the conversation between the characters, plays a significant part in developing them. It tells you about their motivations and attributes. The best stories may start with events but end up being about people. A large part of the dialogue and character building is observing people around you and then clearly bringing what you see to the paper.
As you write, it is often possible to get lost in the trees of the situation and characters and ignore the forest of theme and pace that you are building – the two other key elements of any work.
Once you are done with the first draft, having spent so much effort building out this work, you want to know what you were writing about – the theme of your book, if there is any. Your job is not to create one but to discover one if it exists. The second draft is a good time to build on any existing themes and flesh them out even more.
On the other hand, the pace is the speed at which the story unfolds. Much fiction today is written with the belief that the higher the pace, the easier it is to keep the reader engaged – but you need to find a balance. The best books are written at a pace that allows for character and world-building, which creates a richer tapestry for the readers to be a part of – a great example is The Lord of The Rings. You want to find a happy balance: too slow, and the reader would be bored, too fast, and the reader would be confused, and your story will be shallow.
One last aspect is probably as important to non-fiction as fiction and has a significant impact on the pace. The backstory is what happens to your character before the story starts. You need to unfold some of it for your story to make sense and your character to be rounded. At the same time, you need to understand that your reader is here for the story to move forward, and you only need what is essential to do this.
Research is a special kind of back story. Whenever you are writing about something you don’t know about, you need to do some research to make your story consistent and build credibility with your readers. But avoid the temptation of trying to look smart. Backstory belongs in the background – even in non-fiction.
Like with any such book, there is a lot to unpack, but if there is one takeaway, it is this – love to read and write, spend a lot of time doing it and like most other things in life, you will get better at it. This year, I plan to do just that.
