on writing excerpt

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Excerpts from Stephen King's "On Writing"

Even if you’re not a fan of Stephen King’s fiction, his book on writing is filled with insightful advice on the craft. (Btw, it was also the inspiration for the title of the “On Writing” posts we publish here.) Some excerpts below.

Get the first draft done quickly…

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

On rewriting…

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 what 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.

Second drafts can only help so much…

“A movie should be there in rough cut,” the film editor Paul Hirsch once told me. The same is true of books. I think it’s rare that incoherence or dull storytelling can be solved by something so minor as a second draft.

Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%...

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggest cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)...I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: “Not bad, but PUFFY . You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.”

Practice isn’t painful when you love what you do…

Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading, or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.

Some meaty detective-fiction similes…

My all time favorite similes, by the way, come from the hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include “It was darker than a carload of assholes” (George V. Higgins) and “I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief” (Raymond Chandler).

On writing seminars and the desire for “the right writing environment”...

In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.

What scares the master of fear…

The scariest moment is always just before you start.

“On Writing” at Amazon.

Don Schenck

And always remember: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS WRITER’S BLOCK!

Simply lower your standards.

(Seriously. Think about it)

Fantastic book….

Sorry dude, but it’s “Stephen”, not “Steven”. :)

But yah, fantastic book.

Anonymous Coward

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.”

- On Writing by Stephen King

Say what you want about the man, but he’s an example of one who writes clearly, simply-stated stories, void of flowery language that we all know is prevalent in “literature.”

Great information. Quite helpful. Of course, writing novels is a bit different than writing for the internet, but I can see how this would apply to writing for the internet as well.

I like King’s initial kamikaze approach to the first draft that embraces storyline over similes.

Everyone says they’ll write a book one day, but few do.

If your a Stephen King wannabe, and feel like setting aside fears and making a mad dash for the impossible, join the annual National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo, for short – http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Create a Writeboard and begin to type…

“I’d never had writer’s block before,” said King. “I wasn’t even sure it really existed. I thought it was just other writers being lazy.”

King’s book is great – he cuts right through the bullshit, a style which I whole heartedly approve.

One of my favorite parts was talking about how he now writes where he lives. That when he was at the height of his addictions, he wrote at a huge desk and was isolated from his family. Now his desk is next to the couch and his family is welcome to bounce in and out of the room.

This book is chock full of great lessons. The most important, of course, is that writer’s write.

Stephen King is quoted as calling himself the ‘literary equivalent of big mac and fries’...

Thanks for sharing this. It’s very helpful.

Steven vs Stephen King. Best howler of the year.

Your permalink will forever be mispelled!

I’m not really into the King horror books, but the Dark Tower series is one of the greatest stories I’ve ever read. Right up there with Tolkien as far as “rocked my world” fiction goes. If you haven’t read these yet, do it. Do it now. Better yet, listen to the Audible versions (Frank Muller rules – I wish he were still able to narrate).

You write true, King, I say thank you.

On Writing is one of the best writing books that I’ve read and re-read. Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is another.

Interesting contrast between King and Annie Dillard on the subject of second drafts:

King: ”’A movie should be there in rough cut,’ the film editor Paul Hirsch once told me. The same is true of books. I think it’s rare that incoherence or dull storytelling can be solved by something so minor as a second draft.”

Dillard (in The Writing Life ): “Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs. I hope you will toss it all and not look back.” “You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now.”

I read that when it came out, and I got on a books-on-writing kick a few years back. Ray Bradbury’s “Zen and the Art of Writing,” as well as others’ “Room to Write,” “The Forest for the Trees,” and “Sin and Syntax” were worthwhile reads. I read “Bird by Bird” then as well.

This is awesome – I have always loved reading Ste[ph]en King – what a treat to get tips, etc on how to write. My fav: not having writer’s block.

Jason Alba CEO – JibberJobber.com

Tom P Schaafs

Highly recommended – and with an interestingly familiar title – is William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” . First published in 1976 and refined through the years, this book is a fine example for its own domain. And the density of actionable take-aways is high.

Steve Portigal

The part from that book that I always cite is King’s own references to Kill Your Darlings (I think the original may have been Murder Your Darlings) – iteration involves getting rid of stuff that you may have liked, a lot, and getting rid of it (material, characters, whatever) may be painful but is essential.

The book about Chiat-Day (I’m forgetting the name, right now) describes something familiar, they call it Demo Love. Falling in love with your demo and deciding that it should really be that way when it comes to actually designing something.

I love that book, and reading it really gave me a new respect for King’s books. Say what you want about his novels, the man knows the craft of writing inside-out.

“2nd = 1st -10%” is one of my favorite maxims for writing. The other is “No one likes reading as much as you like writing”.

My personal favourite quote on writing is similar to the writer’s block thought at the top of this list, ‘allow yourself a sh**y first draft.’

Great post and great comments, cheers peeps

Stephen King on writing = Thomas Kinkade on art.

“2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%...” I am hanging this on my cubicle’s wall.

I have read King’s “On Writing” and love it.

And I have the same impression that writing fiction is similar to writing software, so his explanation on writing also apply to programming.

This discussion is closed.

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EXCERPT On Writing A Memoir of the Craft By STEPHEN KING Scribner Read the Review I actually began On Writing in November or December of 1997, and although it usually takes me only three months to finish the first draft of a book, this one was still only half-completed eighteen months later. That was because I'd put it aside in February or March of 1998, not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture. It was the first book I had put aside uncompleted since The Stand , and On Writing spent a lot longer in the desk drawer. In June of 1999, I decided to spend the summer finishing the damn writing book — let Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner decide if it was good or bad, I thought. I read the manuscript over, prepared for the worst, and discovered I actually sort of liked what I had. The road to finishing it seemed clear-cut, too. I had finished the memoir ("C.V."), which attempted to show some of the incidents and life-situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be, and I had covered the mechanics — those that seemed most important to me, at least. What remained to be done was the key section, "On Writing," where I'd try to answer some of the questions I'd been asked in seminars and at speaking engagements, plus all those I wish I'd been asked...those questions about the language. On the night of June seventeenth, blissfully unaware that I was now less than forty-eight hours from my little date with Bryan Smith (not to mention Bullet the rottweiler), I sat down at our dining room table and listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address. On the eighteenth, I wrote the first four pages of the "On Writing" section. That was where the work still stood in late July, when I decided I'd better get back to work...or at least try. I didn't want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee, and restricted to a walker. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in my wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. Added to this was the book itself, which seemed more daunting than ever — how was I supposed to write about dialogue, character, and getting an agent when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet? Yet at the same time I felt I'd reached one of those crossroads moments when you're all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over — had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, Time Has Come Today. It's possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it. In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next. My wife is the person in my life who's most likely to say I'm working too hard, it's time to slow down, stay away from that damn PowerBook for a little while, Steve, give it a rest. When I told her on that July morning that I thought I'd better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn't know, hadn't even thought about it. She thought about it, then said: "I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of plug-ins — you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan." The fan was certainly a must — it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work, the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn't much cooler in the back hall. Tabby spent a couple of hours putting things together, and that afternoon at four o'clock she rolled me out through the kitchen and down the newly installed wheelchair ramp into the back hall. She had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer connected side by side, table lamp, manuscript (with my notes from the month before placed neatly on top), pens, reference materials. Standing on the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer. "Is it all right?" she asked. "It's gorgeous," I said, and hugged her. It was gorgeous. So is she. The former Tabitha Spruce of Oldtown, Maine, knows when I'm working too hard, but she also knows that sometimes its the work that bails me out. She got me positioned at the table, kissed me on the temple, and then left me there to find out if I had anything left to say. It turned out I did. (C) 2000 Stephen King All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-684-85352-3

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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On Writing is both a textbook for writers and a memoir of Stephen's life and will, thus, appeal even to those who are not aspiring writers. If you've always wondered what led Steve to become a writer and how he came to be the success he is today, this will answer those questions.

The Twentieth Anniversary Edition contains contributions from Joe Hill and Owen King Publisher: Scribner (June 2, 2020) Length: 320 pages ISBN13: 9781982159375

From the Flap

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft--and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever. Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so revealing. On Writing begins with a mesmerizing account of King's childhood and his uncannily early focus on writing to tell a story. A series of vivid memories from adolescence, college, and the struggling years that led up to his first novel, Carrie , will afford readers a fresh and often very funny perspective on the formation of a writer. King next turns to the basic tools of his trade--how to sharpen and multiply them through use, and how the writer must always have them close at hand. He takes the reader through crucial aspects of the writer's art and life, offering practical and inspiring advice on everything from plot and character development to work habits and rejection. Serialized in the New Yorker to vivid acclaim, On Writing culminates with a profoundly moving account of how King's overwhelming need to write spurred him toward recovery, and brought him back to his life. Brilliantly structured, friendly and inspiring, On Writing will empower--and entertain--everyone who reads it.

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© Copyright © 2000 - 2020 Stephen King - All Rights Reserved.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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Summary and Study Guide

Stephen King’s 2000 memoir , On Writing, details King’s formation as an author and provides writing advice. The memoir is divided into five sections: “C.V.,” “What Writing Is,” “Toolbox,” “On Writing,” and “On Living.”

In “C.V.,” King provides a curriculum vitae describing how he was formed as a writer. He begins in his early childhood and describes his life with his mother, Nellie, and older brother, David. King’s father is not in the picture, and the family moves around frequently and never has much money. King begins writing as a young child, first copying content from comic books then moving on to original material. He begins publishing work in magazines during his teen years. It isn’t until he writes Carrie that he gains significant financial success as a writer. King marries Tabitha Spruce, and they have three children. This section also describes King’s experience with alcohol and drug abuse. He gets sober in the 1980s, after an intervention from his wife.

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In the brief section “What Writing Is,” King compares writing to telepathy, in which the author must transmit information to the reader. He asserts that it is all possible, and sets the stage for the ensuing section, “Toolbox.” Here, King provides practical advice to the reader about the process of writing. Each writer should have a toolbox containing the basics of vocabulary, grammar, and style .

The following section, “On Writing,” delves deeper into the stylistic elements of writing beyond the fundamentals. King details his own writing practice, which consists of writing behind a closed door every morning. He broaches the topics of plot, story, character, dialogue, theme, sensory detail, pacing , and backstory. Finally, he discusses the process of revision, research, writing seminars, and publication.

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The final brief section, “On Living,” describes King’s near fatal accident. A car hits him on one of his daily walks in 1999 and inflicts many severe injuries, including a leg broken in nine places. King undergoes surgeries and slowly recovers. At the time of the accident, King is in the midst of writing this memoir, and, once he is well enough, continues work on it.  

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The Book in Three Sentences

• Most people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened with practice.
• The writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.
• Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea.

The Five Big Ideas

• “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
• “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.”
• “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”
• “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.”
• “Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”

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On writing summary.

• Stephen believes most people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened with practice.
• “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 what 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.”
• “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.”
• The most important Stephen learned from Carrie White 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.
• “[Writing] starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
• “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. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.”
• “The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
• “Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind if it is appropriate and colorful.”
• “If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course, you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”
• “Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer’s head and then leaps to the reader’s.”
• “Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float.”
• “The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.”
• “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.”
• “The adverb is not your friend.”
• “Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.”
• “I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions … and not even then, if you can avoid it.”
• “The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said.”
• “You always add ’s, even when the word you’re modifying ends in s—always write Thomas’s bike and never Thomas’ bike.”
• “If you want to be a writer, 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.”
• “Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”
• “Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people.”
• “What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.”
• “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 creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.”
• “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
• “One of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us.”
• “Everything I’ve said about dialogue applies to building characters in fiction. The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.”
• “Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”
• “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.”
• “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing.”
• “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
• “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

Recommended Reading

If you like On Writing , you may also enjoy the following books:

• Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
• You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins

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A Memoir of the Craft

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About The Book

About the author.

Stephen King is the author of more than sixty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. His recent work includes the short story collection You Like It Darker ,  Holly ,  Fairy Tale ,  Billy Summers ,  If It Bleeds ,  The Institute ,  Elevation ,  The Outsider ,  Sleeping Beauties  (cowritten with his son Owen King), and the Bill Hodges trilogy:  End of Watch ,  Finders Keepers , and  Mr. Mercedes  (an Edgar Award winner for Best Novel and a television series streaming on Peacock). His novel  11/22/63  was named a top ten book of 2011 by  The New York Times Book Review  and won the  Los Angeles Times  Book Prize for Mystery/Thriller. His epic works  The Dark Tower ,  It ,  Pet Sematary ,  Doctor Sleep , and  Firestarter  are the basis for major motion pictures, with  It  now the highest-grossing horror film of all time. He is the recipient of the 2020 Audio Publishers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2018 PEN America Literary Service Award, the 2014 National Medal of Arts, and the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King. 

Product Details

• Publisher: Scribner (June 2, 2020)
• Length: 320 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982159375

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Raves and Reviews

"The best book about writing ever written." — The Guardian

"A one-of-a-kind classic." — The Wall Street Journal

"This is a special book, animated by a unique intelligence, and filled with useful truth." —Michael Chabon

" On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style ." —Roger Ebert

“The best book on writing. Ever.” — The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, on writing: a memoir of the craft.

I actually began ON WRITING in November or December of 1997, and although it usually takes me only three months to finish the first draft of a book, this one was still only half-completed eighteen months later. That was because I'd put it aside in February or March of 1998, not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture. It was the first book I had put aside uncompleted since THE STAND, and ON WRITING spent a lot longer in the desk drawer.

In June of 1999, I decided to spend the summer finishing the damn writing book --- let Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner decide if it was good or bad, I thought. I read the manuscript over, prepared for the worst, and discovered I actually sort of liked what I had. The road to finishing it seemed clear-cut, too. I had finished the memoir ("C.V."), which attempted to show some of the incidents and life-situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be, and I had covered the mechanics --- those that seemed most important to me, at least. What remained to be done was the key section, "On Writing," where I'd try to answer some of the questions I'd been asked in seminars and at speaking engagements, plus all those I wish I'd been asked...those questions about the language.

On the night of June seventeenth, blissfully unaware that I was now less than forty-eight hours from my little date with Bryan Smith (not to mention Bullet the rottweiler), I sat down at our dining room table and listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address. On the eighteenth, I wrote the first four pages of the "On Writing" section. That was where the work still stood in late July, when I decided I'd better get back to work...or at least try.

I didn't want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee, and restricted to a walker. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in my wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. Added to this was the book itself, which seemed more daunting than ever --- how was I supposed to write about dialogue, character, and getting an agent when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet?

Yet at the same time I felt I'd reached one of those crossroads moments when you're all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over --- had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, Time Has Come Today. It's possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it.

In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.

My wife is the person in my life who's most likely to say I'm working too hard, it's time to slow down, stay away from that damn PowerBook for a little while, Steve, give it a rest. When I told her on that July morning that I thought I'd better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn't know, hadn't even thought about it.

She thought about it, then said: "I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of plug-ins --- you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan." The fan was certainly a must --- it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work, the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn't much cooler in the back hall.

Tabby spent a couple of hours putting things together, and that afternoon at four o'clock she rolled me out through the kitchen and down the newly installed wheelchair ramp into the back hall. She had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer connected side by side, table lamp, manuscript (with my notes from the month before placed neatly on top), pens, reference materials. Standing on the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer.

"Is it all right?" she asked.

"It's gorgeous," I said, and hugged her. It was gorgeous. So is she.

The former Tabitha Spruce of Oldtown, Maine, knows when I'm working too hard, but she also knows that sometimes its the work that bails me out. She got me positioned at the table, kissed me on the temple, and then left me there to find out if I had anything left to say. It turned out I did.

Excerpted from ON WRITING: A Memoir of the Craft © Copyright 2000 by Stephen King. Reprinted with permission by Scribner. All rights reserved.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by by Stephen King

• Genres: Nonfiction
• hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Scribner
• ISBN-10: 0684853523
• ISBN-13: 9780684853529

On Writing Well

William zinsser, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Zinsser's On Writing Well . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

On Writing Well: Introduction

On writing well: plot summary, on writing well: detailed summary & analysis, on writing well: themes, on writing well: quotes, on writing well: characters, on writing well: terms, on writing well: symbols, on writing well: theme wheel, brief biography of william zinsser.

Historical Context of On Writing Well

Other books related to on writing well.

• Full Title: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction
• When Written: June–August 1975
• Where Written: Niantic, Connecticut
• When Published: 1976 (1st ed.); 1980 (2nd ed.); 1985 (3rd ed.); 1990 (4th ed.); 1994 (5th ed.); 1998 (6th ed.); 2001 (25th Anniversary ed.); 2006 (30th Anniversary ed.)
• Literary Period: Contemporary
• Genre: Nonfiction
• Point of View: First Person

Extra Credit for On Writing Well

What’s in a Name. Zinsser originally wanted to call his book Writing Well . But his editor, Buz Wyeth, noted that the poet Donald Hall had already published a book by that name, so he suggested that Zinsser add “On” to the title.

Careful Quoting. In On Writing Well , Zinsser had to cut most excerpts from other writers’ work to 300 words in order to stay within “fair use” rules (and avoid paying most of his book’s profits in royalties). However, he actually appreciated this limit, because it forced him to guide his readers through other writers’ work, rather than just turning his book into an anthology of their work.

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Excerpt from On Writing: A Memoir of The Craft by Stephen King, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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On Writing: A Memoir of The Craft

by Stephen King

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I actually began On Writing in November or December of 1997, and although it usually takes me only three months to finish the first draft of a book, this one was still only half-completed eighteen months later. That was because I'd put it aside in February or March of 1998, not sure how to continue, or if I should continue at all. Writing fiction was almost as much fun as it had ever been, but every word of the nonfiction book was a kind of torture. It was the first book I had put aside uncompleted since The Stand , and On Writing spent a lot longer in the desk drawer. In June of 1999, I decided to spend the summer finishing the damn writing book -- let Susan Moldow and Nan Graham at Scribner decide if it was good or bad, I thought. I read the manuscript over, prepared for the worst, and discovered I actually sort of liked what I had. The road to finishing it seemed clear-cut, too. I had finished the memoir ("C.V."), which attempted to show some of the incidents and life-situations which made me into the sort of writer I turned out to be, and I had covered the mechanics -- those that seemed most important to me, at least. What remained to be done was the key section, "On Writing," where I'd try to answer some of the questions I'd been asked in seminars and at speaking engagements, plus all those I wish I'd been asked...those questions about the language. On the night of June seventeenth, blissfully unaware that I was now less than forty-eight hours from my little date with Bryan Smith (not to mention Bullet the rottweiler), I sat down at our dining room table and listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address. On the eighteenth, I wrote the first four pages of the "On Writing" section. That was where the work still stood in late July, when I decided I'd better get back to work...or at least try. I didn't want to go back to work. I was in a lot of pain, unable to bend my right knee, and restricted to a walker. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a desk for long, even in my wheelchair. Because of my cataclysmically smashed hip, sitting was torture after forty minutes or so, impossible after an hour and a quarter. Added to this was the book itself, which seemed more daunting than ever -- how was I supposed to write about dialogue, character, and getting an agent when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet? Yet at the same time I felt I'd reached one of those crossroads moments when you're all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over -- had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, Time Has Come Today. It's possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it. In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next. My wife is the person in my life who's most likely to say I'm working too hard, it's time to slow down, stay away from that damn PowerBook for a little while, Steve, give it a rest. When I told her on that July morning that I thought I'd better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up. I told her I didn't know, hadn't even thought about it. She thought about it, then said: "I can rig a table for you in the back hall, outside the pantry. There are plenty of plug-ins -- you can have your Mac, the little printer, and a fan." The fan was certainly a must -- it had been a terrifically hot summer, and on the day I went back to work, the temperature outside was ninety-five. It wasn't much cooler in the back hall.

Copyright © 2000 by Stephen King

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34 Profound Excerpts From Classic Literature That Will Change Your Day

• https://thoughtcatalog.com/?p=232327

1. littlemusicteacher

“Alright then, I’ll go to hell.” – Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck has been led to believe it would be sinful to help his friend Jim, a runaway slave. In this chapter, Huck finds his own moral compass and decides to do what he feels is the right thing, even though others have told him he would go to hell for it.

“’Why did you do all this for me?’ he asked. ‘I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.’ ‘You have been my friend,’ replied Charlotte. ‘That in itself is a tremendous thing.’” E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web

3. juicyfizz

“When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.” – John Steinbeck, East of Eden

4. Cloudcanopy

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

5. throwaway421e

“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

7. Pizzahuthut

“Anything worth dying for is certainly worth living for.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

8. Sadfrogs

“All grown-ups were once children…but only few of them remember it.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

9. student_of_bokonon

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—’God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.'” – Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

10. Tolkien23

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?” – Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

11. DeathisLaughing

“All was forgiven. All living things were brothers, all dead things even more so.” – Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

12. faithlovehappiness

“And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.” – Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

13. Boddhisatvaa

“In the mirrors of the many judgments, my hands are the color of blood. I sometimes fancy myself an evil which exists to oppose other evils; and on that great Day of which the prophets speak but in which they do not truly believe, on the day the world is utterly cleansed of evil, then I too will go down into darkness, swallowing curses. Until then, I will not wash my hands nor let them hang useless.” ― Roger Zelazny, The Guns of Avalon

14. Felopzd

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was a light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

15. bUbggj2nS7Fz

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” – Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

16. Fools_Gold_4_Sale

“So much the worse for those who fear wine, for it is because they have bad thoughts which they are afraid the liquor will extract from their hearts…The wicked are great drinkers of water; As the flood proved once for all.” – Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

17. Uhlyssss

“Try to imagine a life without timekeeping. You probably can’t. You know the month, the year, the day of the week. There is a clock on your wall or the dashboard of your car. You have a schedule, a calendar, a time for dinner or a movie. Yet all around you, timekeeping is ignored. Birds are not late. A dog does not check its watch. Deer do not fret over passing birthdays. Man alone measures time. Man alone chimes the hour. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.” – Mitch Albom, The Time Keeper

18. Green_EggsandSam

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And then one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

19. graveyardpeanut

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

20. Antiochli

“Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is another kind of clay.” – Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

21. battahmonster

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” James Joyce, Dubliners , “The Dead”

22. CecilChaminade

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures.” – William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

23. Kimmie_kim_kim_kim

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” – George Orwell, 1984

24. CecilChaminade

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” – Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.” Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

26. catch_herintherye

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

27. slowpoke257

“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.” – Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

28. mortalitus

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”- George Orwell, Animal Farm

30. heknowsitsme

“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.” – Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated

31. Oneinchwalrus

“We look up at the same stars, and see such different things.” – George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords

32. CrustyJello

“Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

33. Barnsalot

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.” – John Green, Looking for Alaska

“We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately – the object seemed incidental to this will to give ourselves away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into. Flight from exactly what? These rooms, blandly filled with excrement and heat? To what purpose?” – David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Charlie Shaw

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Is ‘Baby Reindeer’ Anti-Feminist?

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Ex-stripper and mother of Hunter Biden’s estranged child writes tell-all book

A tell-all book from Lunden Roberts , the ex-stripper and mother of Hunter Biden's estranged child Navy Joan Roberts, is set to hit shelves in late August.

The book, Out of the Shadows: My Life Inside the Wild World of Hunter Biden, dives into the relationship Lunden Roberts had with the son of President Joe Biden and describes the first moment the pair met, according to a description from Skyhorse Publishing.

"He was sitting there wearing nothing but parrot boxer briefs, organizing his pipes on his Rosemont Seneca desk," an excerpt from the book reads. "I was sitting in Barack Obama's actual chair from the Senate floor. I took another look at Hunter — this kind, intense, and startlingly transparent man — and thought, 'This is definitely a guy I want to get to know better.'"

The book also details Lunden Roberts's journey from Arkansas to Washington, D.C., and the "live-for-the-moment" energy of Hunter Biden.

"What followed from that first meeting was a wild journey that would come to define Lunden's young life in ways she never could have anticipated," the description reads. "[Out of the Shadows] chronicles that rollercoaster ride of a relationship, touching on the drug cook working in Rosemont Seneca's kitchen, strip clubs where Hunter might try the pole himself, protecting him from would-be terrorists in New York City, the night she grabbed two guns and was certain she would have to fatally shoot a crazed MMA fighter, and dozens of other stories that make the laptop debacle seem routine."

Lunden Roberts and Hunter Biden privately settled a child support dispute in Arkansas last year.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Navy Joan Roberts was born in Arkansas in August 2018 and was conceived while Hunter Biden was in a relationship with Hallie Biden, the widow of his deceased brother, Beau Biden.

Out of the Shadows is set to be released on Aug. 20, 2024.

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Reflective Practice Through Writing

Subscribe to Learning through Experience in Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Google Podcasts , or your favorite podcast player .

This podcast season is all about the HOW of learning through experience. We learn through experience using four core practices: challenging your perspective, stretching and building range, directing your learning, reflection and inquiry. The core practice that we are paying attention to in this episode of Learning Through Experience is reflection and inquiry .

In this episode, I spoke with reflective writing practitioner and teacher Stephanie Dunson about reflective practice through writing . We cover the practice of reflective writing, including the struggle of writing, and she offers some prompts for you to use in your own reflective writing practice.

Stephanie is a renowned facilitator who uses writing as a tool for problem-solving and collaboration in both the academic and corporate worlds.

Key Topics:

04:24 The challenge of writing : The limits of writing towards an outcome in contrast to writing for the reflection and exploration of our own thoughts and feelings;

08:33 The meander of writing : Writing doesn’t work in a straight line, rather it follows a natural sort of meander. By meandering through a piece, we get to know the writer’s mind;

15:18 Reflective writing: The concept of using writing as a tool for deep thinking and developing relationships with complex material;

21:15 Reflective writing in groups : Engaging in the moment of making new ideas as a group and combining the strengths of the individual with the power and diversity of the group;

23:03 The practice of writing : Developing the capacity to reflect, notice, and meander as a practice in life and writing;

30:48 Prompts for reflective writing : What have you considered writing about but abandoned? Explore the places of resistance and write into that space.

Additional Resources from Stephanie Dunson

Podcast: 100 Mistakes Academic Writers Make …and How to Fix Them