On Writing

This is Stephen Kings part auto-biography part memoirs and part instruction on his writing process. I don’t believe Stephen King to be a genuine in the writing industry but he certainly has an impressive output rate of marketable quality writing. He gives a very good KISS method to writing making sure to stay away from things that are unnecessary. He highly highly commends the The Elements of Style by Strunk Jr. who wrote the basic elements of writing in a mere 88 or so pages (I’ve got a copy that i need to read myself). Stephen King advocates for writing around 2000 words a day to develop better writing. He says this is best achieved by finding your own quiet space to write. Seems simple enough. He also advocates for writing with the idea in mind of telling the story to a specific person, your typical first reader. This is someone that you trust and who you want to write a story for. This person doesn’t necessarily even have to be a living person. He says that the mental framing of writing for the person helps produce better stories. One thing I didn’t agree with him about is that he believed that if you were a bad writer, you could not become a good one. That you could only raise one level from your starting writing ability - bad to ok, ok to great, great to spectacular. I don’t believe this to be true and it’s contrary to what I’ve learned about learning: