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22 lessons from Stephen King on how to be a great writer

Timeless advice from the bestselling author, article bookmarked.

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Renowned author Stephen King writes stories that captivate millions of people around the world and earn him an estimated $17 million a year.

In his memoir, On Writing , King shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer. And he doesn't sugarcoat it. He writes, “I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

Don't want to be one of them? Here are 22 great pieces of advice from King's book on how to be an amazing writer:

1. Stop watching television. Instead, read as much as possible.

If you're just starting out as a writer, your television should be the first thing to go. It's “poisonous to creativity,” he says. Writers need to look into themselves and turn toward the life of the imagination.

To do so, they should read as much as they can. King takes a book with him everywhere he goes, and even reads during meals. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” he says. Read widely, and constantly work to refine and redefine your own work as you do so.

2. Prepare for more failure and criticism than you think you can deal with.

King compares writing fiction to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub, because in both, “there's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” Not only will you doubt yourself, but other people will doubt you, too. “If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all,” writes King.

Oftentimes, you have to continue writing even when you don't feel like it. “Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea,” he writes. And when you fail, King suggests that you remain positive. “Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”

3. Don't waste time trying to please people.

According to King, rudeness should be the least of your concerns. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway,” he writes. King used to be ashamed of what he wrote, especially after receiving angry letters accusing him of being bigoted, homophobic, murderous, and even psychopathic.

By the age of 40, he realised that every decent writer has been accused of being a waste of talent. King has definitely come to terms with it. He writes, “If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have.” You can't please all of your readers all the time, so King advises that you stop worrying.

4. Write primarily for yourself.

You should write because it brings you happiness and fulfilment. As King says, “I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

Writer Kurt Vonnegut provides a similar insight: “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about,” he says. “It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

5. Tackle the things that are hardest to write.

“The most important things are the hardest things to say,” writes King. “They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings.” Most great pieces of writing are preceded with hours of thought. In King's mind, “Writing is refined thinking.”

When tackling difficult issues, make sure you dig deeply. King says, “Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground ... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” Writers should be like archaeologists, excavating for as much of the story as they can find.

6. When writing, disconnect from the rest of the world.

Writing should be a fully intimate activity. Put your desk in the corner of the room, and eliminate all possible distractions, from phones to open windows. King advises, “Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open.”

You should maintain total privacy between you and your work. Writing a first draft is “completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”

7. Don't be pretentious.

“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,” says King. He compares this mistake to dressing up a household pet in evening clothes — both the pet and the owner are embarrassed, because it's completely excessive.

As iconic businessman David Ogilvy writes in a memo to his employees , “Never use jargon words like reconceptualise, demassification, attitudinally, judgementally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” Furthermore, don't use symbols unless necessary. “Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity,” writes King.

8. Avoid adverbs and long paragraphs.

As King emphasises several times in his memoir, “the adverb is not your friend.” In fact, he believes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs” and compares them to dandelions that ruin your lawn. Adverbs are worst after “he said” and “she said” — those phrases are best left unadorned.

You should also pay attention to your paragraphs, so that they flow with the turns and rhythms of your story. “Paragraphs are almost always as important for how they look as for what they say,” says King.

9. Don't get overly caught up in grammar.

According to King, writing is primarily about seduction, not precision. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes,” writes King. “The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.” You should strive to make the reader forget that he or she is reading a story at all.

10. Master the art of description.

“Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's,” writes King. The important part isn't writing enough, but limiting how much you say. Visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things “ in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,” he says.

The key to good description is clarity, both in observation and in writing. Use fresh images and simple vocabulary to avoid exhausting your reader. “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling,” notes King.

11. Don't give too much background information.

“What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story,” writes King. “The latter is good. The former is not.” Make sure you only include details that move your story forward and that persuade your reader to continue reading.

If you need to do research, make sure it doesn't overshadow the story. Research belongs “as far in the background and the back story as you can get it,” says King. You may be entranced by what you're learning, but your readers are going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.

12. Tell stories about what people actually do.

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do — to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street,” writes King. The people in your stories are what readers care about the most, so make sure you acknowledge all the dimensions your characters may have.

13. Take risks; don't play it safe.

First and foremost, stop using the passive voice. It's the biggest indicator of fear. “I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing,” King says. Writers should throw back their shoulders, stick out their chins, and put their writing in charge.

“Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it,” King says.

14. Realise that you don't need drugs to be a good writer.

“The idea that the creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time,” says King. In his eyes, substance-abusing writers are just substance-abusers. “Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit.”

15. Don't try to steal someone else's voice.

As King says, “You can't aim a book like a cruise missile.” When you try to mimic another writer's style for any reason other than practice, you'll produce nothing but “pale imitations.” This is because you can never try to replicate the way someone feels and experiences truth, especially not through a surface-level glance at vocabulary and plot.

16. Understand that writing is a form of telepathy.

“All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing is the purest distillation,” says King. An important element of writing is transference. Your job isn't to write words on the page, but rather to transfer the ideas inside your head into the heads of your readers.

“Words are just the medium through which the transfer happens,” says King. In his advice on writing, Vonnegut also recommends that writers “use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

17. Take your writing seriously.

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair,” says King. “Come to it any way but lightly.” If you don't want to take your writing seriously, he suggests that you close the book and do something else.

As writer Susan Sontag says, “The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”

18. Write every single day.

“Once I start work on a project, I don't stop, and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to,” says King. “If I don't write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind ... I begin to lose my hold on the story's plot and pace.”

If you fail to write consistently, the excitement for your idea may begin to fade. When the work starts to feel like work, King describes the moment as “the smooch of death.” His best advice is to just take it “one word at a time.”

19. Finish your first draft in three months.

King likes to write 10 pages a day. Over a three-month span, that amounts to around 180,000 words. “The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season,” he says. If you spend too long on your piece, King believes the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel.

20. When you're finished writing, take a long step back.

King suggests six weeks of “recuperation time” after you're done writing, so you can have a clear mind to spot any glaring holes in the plot or character development. He asserts that a writer's original perception of a character could be just as faulty as the reader's.

King compares the writing and revision process to nature. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees,” he writes. “When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” When you do find your mistakes, he says that “you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.”

21. Have the guts to cut.

When revising, writers often have a difficult time letting go of words they spent so much time writing. But, as King advises, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.”

Although revision is one of the most difficult parts of writing, you need to leave out the boring parts in order to move the story along. In his advice on writing, Vonnegut suggests, “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”

22. Stay married, be healthy, and live a good life.

King attributes his success to two things: his physical health and his marriage. “The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible,” he writes.

It's important to have a strong balance in your life, so writing doesn't consume all of it. In writer and painter Henry Miller's 11 commandments of writing, he advises, “Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.”

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22 lessons from Stephen King on how to be a great writer

Renowned author Stephen King has written over 50 books that have captivated millions of people around the world.

In his memoir , "On Writing," King shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer. And he doesn't sugarcoat it. He writes, "I can't lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers."

Don't want to be one of them? Here are 22 great pieces of advice from King's book  on how to be an amazing writer.

This is an update of an article written by Maggie Zhang.

1. Stop watching television. Instead, read as much as possible.

If you're just starting out as a writer, your television should be the first thing to go. It's "poisonous to creativity," h e says.  Writers need to look into themselves and turn toward the life of the imagination.

To do so, they should read as much as they can. King takes a book with him everywhere he goes, and even reads during meals. "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot," he says. Read widely, and constantly work to refine and redefine your own work as you do so.

2. Prepare for more failure and criticism than you think you can deal with.

King compares writing fiction to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub, because in both, "there's plenty of opportunity for self-doubt." Not only will you doubt yourself, but other people will doubt you, too. "If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all," writes King.

Oftentimes, you have to continue writing even when you don't feel like it. "Stopping a piece of work just because it's hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea," he writes. And when you fail, King suggests that you remain positive. "Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure." 

3. Don't waste time trying to please people.

According to King, rudeness should be the least of your concerns. "If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway," he writes. King used to be ashamed of what he wrote, especially after receiving angry letters accusing him of  being bigoted, homophobic, murderous, and even psychopathic.

By the age of 40, he realized that every  decent writer has been accused of being a waste of talent. King has definitely come to terms with it. He writes, "If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It's what I have." You can't please all of your readers all the time, so King advises that you stop worrying. 

4. Write primarily for yourself.

You should write because it brings you happiness and fulfillment. As King says, "I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever."

Writer Kurt Vonnegut provides a similar insight : "Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about," he says. "It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style."

5. Tackle the things that are hardest to write.

"The most important things are the hardest things to say," writes King. "They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings." Most great pieces of writing are preceded with hours of thought. In King's mind, "Writing is refined thinking."

When tackling difficult issues, make sure you dig deeply. King says, "Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground ... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world." Writers should be like archaeologists, excavating for as much of the story as they can find.

6. When writing, disconnect from the rest of the world.

Writing should be a fully intimate activity.  Put your desk in the corner of the room, and eliminate all possible distractions, from phones to open windows. K ing advises, "Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open."

You should maintain total privacy between you and your work. Writing a first draft is "completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it's the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts."

7. Don't be pretentious.

"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," says King. He compares this mistake to dressing up a household pet in evening clothes — both the pet and the owner are embarrassed, because it's completely excessive.

As iconic businessman  David Ogilvy writes in a memo to his employees , "Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass." Furthermore, don't use symbols unless necessary. "Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity," writes King.

8. Avoid adverbs and long paragraphs.

As King emphasizes several times in his memoir, "the adverb is not your friend." In fact, he believes that "the road to hell is paved with adverbs" and compares them to dandelions that ruin your lawn. Adverbs are worst after "he said" and "she said" — those phrases are best left unadorned.

You should also pay attention to your paragraphs, so that they flow with the turns and rhythms of your story. "Paragraphs are almost always as important for how they look as for what they say," says King. 

9. Don't get overly caught up in grammar.

According to King, writing is primarily about seduction, not precision. "Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes," writes King. "The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story." You should strive to make the reader forget that he or she is reading a story at all.

10. Master the art of description.

"Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's," writes King. The important part isn't writing enough, but limiting how much you say.  Visualize what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things " in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition," he says.

The key to good description is clarity, both in observation and in writing. Use fresh images and simple vocabulary to avoid exhausting your reader. "In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it 'got boring,' the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling," notes King.

11. Don't give too much background information.

"What you need to remember is that there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story," writes King. "The latter is good. The former is not." Make sure you only include details that move your story forward and that persuade your reader to continue reading.

If you need to do research, make sure it doesn't overshadow the story. Research belongs "as far in the background and the back story as you can get it," says King. You may be entranced by what you're learning, but your readers are going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.

12. Tell stories about what people actually do.

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do — to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street," writes King. The people in your stories are what readers care about the most, so make sure you acknowledge all the dimensions your characters may have.

13. Take risks; don't play it safe.

First and foremost, stop using the passive voice. It's the biggest indicator of fear. "I'm convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing," King says. Writers should throw back their shoulders, stick out their chins, and put their writing in charge. 

"Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it," King  says.

14. Realize that you don't need drugs to be a good writer.

"The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time," says King. In his eyes, substance-abusing writers are just substance-abusers. "Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit."

15. Don't try to steal someone else's voice.

As King says, "You can't aim a book like a cruise missile." When you try to mimic another writer's style for any reason other than practice, you'll produce nothing but "pale imitations." This is because you can never try to replicate the way someone feels and experiences truth, especially not through a surface-level glance at vocabulary and plot.

16. Understand that writing is a form of telepathy.

"All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing is the purest distillation," says King. An important element of writing is transference. Your job isn't to write words on the page, but rather to transfer the ideas inside your head into the heads of your readers.

"Words are just the medium through which the transfer happens," says King.  In his advice on writing , Vonnegut also recommends that writers "use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted."

17. Take your writing seriously.

"You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair," says King. "Come to it any way but lightly." I f you don't want to take your writing seriously, he suggests that you close the book and do something else. 

As writer Susan Sontag says , "The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk."

18. Write every single day.

"Once I start work on a project, I don't stop, and I don't slow down unless I absolutely have to," says King. "If I don't write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind ... I begin to lose my hold on the story's plot and pace."

If you fail to write consistently, the excitement for your idea may begin to fade. When the work starts to feel like work, King describes the moment as "the smooch of death."  His best advice is to just take it "one word at a time."

19. Finish your first draft in three months.

King likes to write 10 pages a day. Over a three-month span, that amounts to around 180,000 words. "The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season," he says. If you spend too long on your piece, King believes the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel.

20. When you're finished writing, take a long step back.

King suggests six weeks of "recuperation time" after you're done writing, so you can have a clear mind to spot any glaring holes in the plot or character development. He asserts that a writer's original perception of a character could be just as faulty as the reader's.

King compares the writing and revision process to nature. "When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees," he writes. "When you're done, you have to step back and look at the forest."  When you do find your mistakes, he says that "you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us."

21. Have the guts to cut.

When revising, writers often have a difficult time letting go of words they spent so much time writing. But, as King advises, "Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings."

Although revision is one of the most difficult parts of writing, you need to leave out the boring parts in order to move the story along. In his advice on writing , Vonnegut suggests, "If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out."

22. Stay married, be healthy, and live a good life.

King attributes his success to two things: his physical health and his marriage. "The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible," he writes.

It's important to have a strong balance in your life, so writing doesn't consume all of it. In writer and painter Henry Miller's 11 commandments of writing , he advises, "Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it."

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Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writers

in Writing | January 19th, 2023 7 Comments

Image by the USO, via Flickr Com­mons

In one of my favorite Stephen King inter­views, for The Atlantic , he talks at length about the vital impor­tance of a good open­ing line. “There are all sorts of the­o­ries,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An open­ing line should invite the read­er to begin the sto­ry. It should say: Lis­ten. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s dis­cus­sion of open­ing lines is com­pelling because of his dual focus as an avid read­er and a prodi­gious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either per­spec­tive:

We’ve talked so much about the read­er, but you can’t for­get that the open­ing line is impor­tant to the writer, too. To the per­son who’s actu­al­ly boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a door­way that fits us both.

This is excel­lent advice. As you ori­ent your read­er, so you ori­ent your­self, point­ing your work in the direc­tion it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the open­ing line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That per­fect­ly craft­ed and invit­ing open­ing sen­tence is some­thing that emerges in revi­sion, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work hap­pens.

Revi­sion in the sec­ond draft, “one of them, any­way,” may “neces­si­tate some big changes” says King in his 2000 mem­oir slash writ­ing guide On Writ­ing . And yet, it is an essen­tial process, and one that “hard­ly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twen­ty rules from On Writ­ing . About half of these relate direct­ly to revi­sion. The oth­er half cov­er the intangibles—attitude, dis­ci­pline, work habits. A num­ber of these sug­ges­tions reli­ably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of tri­al and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog —“over 350 mil­lion copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”

1. First write for your­self, and then wor­ry about the audi­ence. “When you write a sto­ry, you’re telling your­self the sto­ry. When you rewrite, your main job is tak­ing out all the things that are not the sto­ry.”

2. Don’t use pas­sive voice. “Timid writ­ers like pas­sive verbs for the same rea­son that timid lovers like pas­sive part­ners. The pas­sive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, espe­cial­ly after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over per­fect gram­mar. “The object of fic­tion isn’t gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness but to make the read­er wel­come and then tell a sto­ry.”

6. The mag­ic is in you. “I’m con­vinced that fear is at the root of most bad writ­ing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t wor­ry about mak­ing oth­er peo­ple hap­py. “If you intend to write as truth­ful­ly as you can, your days as a mem­ber of polite soci­ety are num­bered, any­way.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while work­ing out or any­where else—really is about the last thing an aspir­ing writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a sea­son.”

11. There are two secrets to suc­cess. “I stayed phys­i­cal­ly healthy, and I stayed mar­ried.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a sin­gle page or an epic tril­o­gy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accom­plished one word at a time.”

13. Elim­i­nate dis­trac­tion. “There should be no tele­phone in your writ­ing room, cer­tain­ly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One can­not imi­tate a writer’s approach to a par­tic­u­lar genre, no mat­ter how sim­ple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Sto­ries are relics, part of an undis­cov­ered pre-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 intact as pos­si­ble.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find read­ing your book over after a six-week lay­off to be a strange, often exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence.”

17. Leave out the bor­ing parts and kill your dar­lings. “(kill your dar­lings, kill your dar­lings, even when it breaks your ego­cen­tric lit­tle scribbler’s heart, kill your dar­lings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t over­shad­ow the sto­ry. “Remem­ber that word back . That’s where the research belongs: as far in the back­ground and the back sto­ry as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer sim­ply by read­ing and 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.”

20. Writ­ing is about get­ting hap­py. “Writ­ing isn’t about mak­ing mon­ey, get­ting famous, get­ting dates, get­ting laid or mak­ing friends. Writ­ing is mag­ic, as much as the water of life as any oth­er cre­ative art. The water is free. So drink.”

See a fuller expo­si­tion of King’s writ­ing wis­dom at Barnes & Noble’s blog .

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 69 Pages of Writ­ing Advice Denis John­son Col­lect­ed from Flan­nery O’Connor, Jack Ker­ouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thomp­son, Wern­er Her­zog & Many Oth­ers

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Comments (7) |

Related posts:

Comments (7), 7 comments so far.

That is a great view to start from.

What does pla­gia­rist mean.

Great tips to write by. Thank you Bar­ry Boyd

It was worth the read. Thanks for this knowl­edge.

Thank u this helped a lot I won’t to write a book so bad but iam a bad speller and iam iam to dis­tract­ed but earth­ey things like phone and what going on in the world so what I took out of this is but that creap a why and get writ­ing

Leave out the bor­ing parts? Physi­cian, heal thy­self. Fol­low­ing that rule would halve every dark tow­er book after IV. Leave out bor­ing parts, indeed.

I first read the advice about avoid­ing any dis­trac­tions like the phone or TV in one of Study­bay’s blog posts about how to write an essay. And I see sim­i­lar advice here, too. I can only agree 100% with this point.

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15 Best Writing Tips From Stephen King: Advice From One of the Most Successful Authors of the Modern Era

Discover our guide with the top writing tips from Stephen King to begin your writing journey.

Over the last 50 years, Stephen King has published more than 80 novels. Thirty of them have made the New York Times best-seller list, and dozens became movies. He is the gold standard of American fiction writers and almost single-handedly breathed new life into horror in the 80s and 90s. Before all of that literary success, however, he was an English teacher, beloved by his students and dedicated to inspiring generations of new writers.

King no longer teaches writing classes, but lucky for us, he has published On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , a funny, intimate look at both his successes and failures as an author, as well as his best advice for those of us looking to improve our writing skills. The writing advice in Stephen King’s book is practical, irreverent, friendly, and sure to encourage anyone interested in learning the craft from a master.

1. Avoid Adverbs

2. steer clear of the passive voice, 3. consider it a conversation, 4. get to the point, 5. read, read, and read some more, 6. edit ruthlessly, 7. keep a clear head, 8. be fearless, 9. be unapologetically you, 10. eliminate distraction, 11. love what you do, 12. take a break, 13. start writing and keep writing, 14. don’t let critics get you down, 15.  listen to feedback.

King famously quipped that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.” He explains that they are often unnecessary, and if they are left unchecked, they will take over your writing like weeds. The best way to eliminate adverbs is to replace them with a more descriptive metaphor or a simile. Instead of saying that she wrote timidly, for example, say that she wrote as if any one of the keys might be a detonator.

The passive voice occurs when the object of the action becomes the sentence’s subject. “The dog chased the ball” is written in the active voice, while “the ball was chased by the dog” is a passive voice construction.

King argues that many writers “feel the passive voice somehow lends their work authority, perhaps even a quality of majesty.” However, the result often sounds stiff and pretentious. “The book signing was poorly attended” sounds like something your English professor might say, peering over his glasses, but “only a few people went to the book signing” comes across as far more conversational. You might also be interested in our post detailing what’s going on with Stephen King on Twitter .

As a master storyteller, King contends that writing fiction isn’t just about putting words on a page. It’s about inviting your reader into the action and making them feel like they are a part of the story. He suggests remembering that “description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” To become a good writer, be a good reader. Pause, change roles, and reread what you have written from the audience’s perspective.

Fiction writers can quickly get bogged down when they must include the entire life history of each of their characters. King shares that you should only write what is necessary to the tale, saying, “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.” When describing your character’s background and physical characteristics, ask yourself if it is truly necessary. Does it add to the story? Does it help the audience understand why your character thinks, feels, and behaves as they do? If not, take it out.

Professional writers, especially those who are just building their careers, often believe they must stay laser-focused on writing. Still, King insists that making time to read is essential to a writer’s ultimate success.” If you don’t have time to read,” he says, “you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

Read the writers that you love, and study what they do. Notice how they develop their characters, pace the action, and create their settings. When you read, you visit new worlds, meet new people, and gain new insight. You learn new words and discover new truths, which will undoubtedly make you a better writer. Read to learn, but don’t forget to read just for the joy of it too. Reading for reading’s sake is the surest way to remember why you want to write.

King promises that eliminating needless words and extraneous parts of the story, even when attached to them, will make your writing more powerful. “Kill your darlings,” he pleads. “Kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Writers often labor over finding the right word, making the setting come to life, or perfecting dialogue. In the process, they sometimes grow invested in passages that don’t serve the story. When it comes to editing, put your feelings aside and take the knife to anything extraneous. It might hurt, but your writing will be better for it.

We’ve all heard the stereotypical stories of famous writers whose creative energies and imaginations were unleashed, even multiplied, by alcohol and drugs. We imagine the likes of Hemingway, Poe, Fitzgerald, and Dylan Thomas clacking away on their typewriters or scribbling in their journals with a cut crystal decanter of something strong at their sides. King, however, says the opposite was true for him.

Early in his career, Stephen King wrote in a haze of everything from beer and Nyquil, to Valium and Xanax, until finally, his family staged an intervention. Reflecting on how his addictions affected his writing, he says that his book The Tommyknockers is “just awful” and about twice as long as it should be. “There’s really a good book in [t]here” he laments, “underneath all the sort of spurious energy that cocaine provides.”

“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing,” King contends. The best writers can set aside all their worries and doubts and face the blank page with courage. Those who are caught up in thinking about whether or not they are “doing it right” or if they will ever be published often lose their nerve or alter their writing so much that they lose their unique voice. Don’t worry about what you think will sell, or what today’s audiences want; write for yourself, and you will have won half the battle.

You can’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Some readers are going to love your work, and others will dismiss you out of hand. If you develop your style, you must develop a thick skin and trust your instincts. King suggests that you not worry too much about what people think of you because “if you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

One of King’s simplest and best pieces of advice is to rid yourself of distractions. “There’s should be no telephone in your writing room,” he says, and “certainly no TV or video games for you to fool around with.” He says he feels lucky to have been one of the last successful writers to have grown up without a steady diet of relentless distractions.

One has to wonder if Thoreau, Dickinson, and Twain would have contributed what they did to American literature if they had been forced to contend with emails and text messages. If you want to succeed, take a page from their books, and weed out all of the things that stand between you and your work so that you can focus on perfecting your craft.

It can be so easy to get caught up in the writing business, to spend long hours learning the ropes of the publishing world, marketing yourself, and looking for an editor and an agent, that you forget why you’re doing it in the first place. As King insists, “writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends.

Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.” It’s important, of course, for you to educate yourself on becoming a professional writer, but don’t let that become your focus. Write for fun sometimes, without thinking about it will amount to. 

Writing should add to your life, not become it. You can’t tell a good story, inspire and move, and speak to the heart of humanity if you are locked away in your writing room and calling that a life. Nurture your other hobbies. Spend time with loved ones. Travel. Eat. Read. Remember, “life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

The hardest part of the writing process is often just getting started. New writers sometimes believe that to start, they need to have their stories all planned, their characters completely mapped out, and their ideas fully formed, so they make endless notes and charts and never actually create the first draft. King says, “amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” Don’t get stalled out in the planning stage or spend a lot of time stressing about perfection. That’s why second drafts were invented.

Stephen King was only 26 when he published his first novel, Carrie , but he was no stranger to rejection. “By the time I was fourteen” he recalls, “the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.” It’s good to remember that even the most successful writers have had their share of disappointment.

King suggests that novelists “write with the door closed, [but] rewrite with the door open.” He means that fear and rejection can hinder the writing process, but that doesn’t mean that readers’ reactions and the advice of editors and critics should be dismissed. If you want to improve as a writer, put aside your pride and listen to and evaluate what people say about your writing. Not all of it will be helpful, but some can offer insight you might have missed.

Learning how to tell stories isn’t always easy. If you’re looking for a course, check out our review of Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass .

If you still need help, read our storytelling guide .

Stefani is a freelance writer who specializes in lifestyle and literary pieces. She worked for several years as a high school English teacher before becoming a full-time writer. Stefani is pursuing a graduate degree in English literature focusing on contemporary poetry. When not writing, you can find her in the garden, making plans for her next road trip, or in her workshop, where she restores vintage and antique furniture.

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New Releases

You Like It Darker

Release Date: May 21st, 2024

From legendary storyteller and master of short fiction Stephen King comes an extraordinary new collection of twelve short stories, many never-before-published, and some of his best EVER. “You like it darker? Fine, so do I,”  writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life—both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King writes to feel “the exhilaration of leaving ordinary day-to-day life behind,” and in  You Like It Darker , readers will feel that exhilaration too, again and again. “Two Talented Bastids” explores the long-hidden secret of how the eponymous gentlemen got their skills. In “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a brief and unprecedented psychic flash upends dozens of lives, Danny’s most catastrophically. In “Rattlesnakes,” a sequel to  Cujo , a grieving widower travels to Florida for respite and instead receives an unexpected inheritance—with major strings attached. In “The Dreamers,” a taciturn Vietnam vet answers a job ad and learns that there are some corners of the universe best left unexplored. “The Answer Man” asks if prescience is good luck or bad and reminds us that a life marked by unbearable tragedy can still be meaningful. King’s ability to surprise, amaze, and bring us both terror and solace remains unsurpassed. Each of these stories holds its own thrills, joys, and mysteries; each feels iconic. You like it darker? You got it.

Coming Soon

Latest news, -->you like it darker excerpt -->.

Posted: May 21st, 2024 10:37:24 am EDT

Head over to Esquire to read an excerpt from Stephen King’s  You Like It Darker When a famous writer dies at ninety, his son investigates the defining friendship of his life. Turns out the old man kept his friends close—and his secrets closer. Read the Excerpt Now

-->Stephen Reads from YOU LIKE IT DARKER -->

Posted: April 3rd, 2024 8:53:00 pm EDT

Tune in to the YouTube Premiere of Stephen reading an excerpt from his upcoming collection You Like It Darker on April 18th at 2pm EST. YouTube (Don't worry, you can still see it after the premiere!)

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Stephen King has spent half a century scaring us, but his legacy is so much more than horror

It’s a big year for King adaptations, but the movies only tell part of the story.

by Aja Romano

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how influential Stephen King is. For the past four decades, no single writer has dominated the landscape of genre writing like him. To date, he is the only author in history to have had more than 30 books become No. 1 best-sellers. He now has more than 70 published books, many of which have become cultural icons, and his achievements extend so far beyond a single genre at this point that it’s impossible to limit him to one — even though, as the world was reminded last year when the feature film adaptation of It became the highest-grossing horror movie on record, horror is still King’s calling card.

In fact, we’ve been enjoying a cultural resurgence of quality King horror adaptations lately, from small-screen adaptations like Gerald’s Game and Castle Rock to the upcoming remake of Pet Sematary , the first trailer for which looks like a promising continuation of the trend.

That means if you’re a King fan — or looking to become one — there’s no better time to rediscover why he’s such a beloved cultural phenomenon.

After all, without King, we wouldn’t have modern works like Stranger Things , whose adolescent ensemble directly channels the Losers’ Club, King’s ensemble of geeky preteen friends from It . Without The Shining , and Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece film adaptation, “Here’s Johnny!” would be a dead talk show catchphrase and parodies like the Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror would be bereft of much of their material.

Without Carrie , we wouldn’t have the single defining image of the horror of high school: a vat of pig’s blood being dropped on an unsuspecting prom queen. Without King, we wouldn’t have one of the most iconic and recognizable images in cinema history — Andy Dufresne standing in the rain after escaping from Shawshank prison — nor would we have the enduring horror of Pennywise the Clown, Cujo the slavering St. Bernard, or Kathy Bates’s pitch-perfect stalker fan in Misery .

This is but a sampling born from a staggeringly prolific writing career that’s well on its way to spanning five decades. King has effectively been translating America’s private, communal, and cultural fears and serving them up to us on grisly platters for half a century.

King might have remained a struggling English teacher, but for two women: Tabitha King and Carrie White

Born in 1947, King grew up poor in Durham, Maine, the younger son of a single working mother whose husband, a merchant mariner, abandoned his family when King was still a toddler. A lifelong fan of speculative fiction, King began writing seriously while attending the University of Maine Orono. It was there, in 1969, that he met his wife, Tabitha.

By 1973, King was a high school English teacher drawing a meager $6,400 a year. He had married Tabitha in 1971, and the pair lived in a trailer in Hampden, Maine, and each worked additional jobs to make ends meet. King wrote numerous short stories, some of which were published by Playboy and other men’s magazines, but significant writerly success eluded him.

Tabitha, who’d been one of the first to read Stephen’s short stories in colleges, had loaned Stephen her own typewriter and refused to let him take a higher-paying job that would mean less time to write. Tabitha was also the one who discovered draft pages of what would become Carrie tossed in Stephen’s trash can. She retrieved them and ordered him to keep working on the idea. Ever since, King has continued to pay Tabitha’s encouragement forward. He frequently and effusively blurbs books from established as well as new authors, citing a clear wish to leave publishing better than he found it. Meanwhile, Tabitha is a respected author in her own right , as are both of their sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.

Carrie, which King sold for a $2,500 advance, would go on to earn $400,000 for the rights to its paperback run. The story of a troubled girl who develops powers of telekinesis, Carrie is the ultimate “high school is hell” morality tale. Carrie faces ruthless abuse from her religious mother and bullying from high school classmates, and the book introduces us to two of King’s most prominent themes: small Maine towns with dark underbellies, and main characters written with care and empathy despite being deeply flawed and morally gray — in this case Carrie, her mother, and her bully Sue. The complicated bond between protagonist and antagonist is also a recurring motif in King’s writing.

Two years after Carrie ’s publication, Brian De Palma’s 1976 film adaptation grossed $33 million on a $1.8 million budget, largely on the strength of advance critical praise and word-of-mouth reviews. Buoyed by the subsequent success of Carrie ’s paperback sales, King would go on to churn out six novels ( Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Rage, The Stand, The Long Walk, and The Dead Zone ) over the next six years, establishing a prolificacy that would continue through much of his career.

“The movie made the book and the book made me,” King told the New York Times in 1979.

By 1980 , King was the world’s best-selling author.

It’s taken decades for King’s work to be critically appreciated — in particular for its literary qualities

King’s work has appeared in magazines ranging from the New Yorker to Harper’s to Playboy. The author has influenced literary writers like Haruki Murakami and Sherman Alexie along with genre creators like the producers of Lost . And he’s won virtually every major horror, mystery, science fiction, and fantasy award there is. But King also spent decades being written off by both the horror writing community and the literary mainstream.

King once referred to critics perceiving him to be “a rich hack,” a perception that bears out in horror writer David Schow’s offhand 1997 description of him as “comparable to McDonald’s” — intended to characterize King as horror’s pedestrian mainstream. When a 1994 King short story , his first to be published in the New Yorker, won the prestigious O. Henry Award, Publishers Weekly declared it to be “one of the weaker stories in this year’s [O. Henry Award] collection.”

“The price he pays for being Stephen King is not being taken seriously,” one of King’s collaborators told the LA Times in 1995.

The critical disparagement of King often went hand in hand with genre shaming. In a 1997 60 Minutes interview , Lesley Stahl questioned King’s literary tastes, getting him to admit that he’d never read Jane Austen and had only read one Tolstoy novel. In response, King grinned that he had, instead, read every novel Dean Koontz had ever written — Dean Koontz being a notoriously lowbrow writer of thrillers. (That same year, the New York Times would compliment the breadth of King’s literary knowledge even while panning his epic best-seller The Stand. )

“Here you are, one of the best- selling authors in all of history,” Stahl continued, “and the critics cannot find much that they like in your work.”

To this, King replied, “All I can say is — and this is in response to the critics who've often said that my work is awkward and sometimes a little bit painful — I know it. I'm doing the best I can with what I've got.”

While King’s self-deprecation may have been a mark of respect for his critics, those critics were on the cusp of being proven wrong. This was in large part thanks to the sleeping giant that became The Shawshank Redemption, which drew popular attention to the fact that King could do more than “just” write horror, and helped kick-start critical reassessment of him and his work.

The film, written by longtime Stephen King adapter Frank Darabont, is based on one of King’s most literary works, a 1982 novella about an agonizingly slow prison break. Shawshank flopped when it opened in theaters in 1994, but it was nominated for seven Academy Awards — more than any other King adaptation. As indicated by its long reign as the highest-ranked film on IMDB , it has gone on to become one of the most popular and beloved films ever made.

By 1998, under the oversight of a new publisher, King’s books were actively being marketed as literary fiction for the first time. From the mid-’90s through today, King’s critical and cultural reputation has advanced as thoroughly as it stagnated before.

In a 2013 CBS interview , we see the marked difference with which contemporary media has come to view King’s work: “You used to always get slotted in the Horror genre,” interviewer Anthony Mason commented to King. “And I think it was sort of a way of some people, I think, not treating you all that seriously as a writer.”

“I don't know if I want to be treated seriously per se, because in the end posterity decides whether it's good work or whether it's lasting work,” King replied, secure in his position as one of the best-loved authors of the 20th century.

But evolving cultural views on genre fiction aside, King’s writing has always displayed significant literary qualities, particularly ongoing literary themes that have shaped how we understand horror as well as ourselves.

The horror of Stephen King doesn’t lie with the external but with the internal

In his award-winning 1981 collection of essays on horror, Danse Macabre , King names three emotions that belong to the realm of the horror genre: terror, horror, and revulsion. He argues that while all three emotions are of equal value to the creation of horror, the “finest” and most worthy is terror because it rests on the creator’s ability to command audiences’ imaginations. Drawing on numerous writers before him, he posits that never fully revealing the source of the horror is the best way to effect terror upon the mind.

King argues that the art of making us terrified about what lies around the corner is all about getting us to identify with the characters who are experiencing the terror. If we don’t care about the characters, then it won’t matter how many jump scares you fling at the audience — we have to be at least a little invested in their fate.

As such, King spends a great deal of time on characters’ interior lives, often jumping between different point-of-view characters throughout his novels. (For example, Salem’s Lot , It , and The Stand are all stories with large ensemble casts and multiple shifting points of view.) But every characterization, even a minor one, is rich with detail; even if you just met a new character, you can bet that by the time he or she meets a grisly ending a few pages later, you’ll have a deep understanding of who that character is.

King’s novels often contain deeply flawed yet sympathetic central characters surrounded by large ensemble casts full of equally flawed people, each struggling to interact and grapple with larger forces. By framing his stories within an interwoven web of narrative perspectives and juxtaposed character experiences, King is able to generate a feeling of interconnectivity, as well as explore the various literary themes that stretch throughout his multidimensional universe, including but not limited to:

1) Nerdboys to men

King credits his absentee father for bequeathing him a love of horror via a stash of pulp novels King discovered as a boy. But another lasting legacy of this truncated relationship was King’s ongoing preoccupation with relationships between men and boys, the process of attaining manhood, and the bridge between boyhood and adulthood.

We see these bonds take a variety of shapes and meaning throughout his work, ranging from comforting ( Salem’s Lot ) to destructive ( Apt Pupil ) to ambiguous ( The Shining ). King explores male intimacy through these relationships, frequently challenging typical masculine forms of expression. He can do this because his boys and men tend to be nerds and outcasts who already exist outside traditional masculine norms. The bookish nerdy kid was relatively uncommon in mainstream adult fiction before King came along; now we recognize such characters as hallmarks of genre literature.

To King, the social markers that make kids outcasts in school — from being nerdy to being overweight to enduring acne — also make them uniquely outfitted to be conduits for readers’ social anxieties and fears. Because deep down, we’re all reliving the social terrors of school every day of our lives.

2) Creative struggles and struggles with addiction 

King frequently writes about the process of creation, often by exploring an artist who’s been prevented from creating in some way. The main characters of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Misery, The Dark Half, Bag of Bones , 1408, and numerous short stories are all writers who’ve been in some way prevented from writing or thwarted in their creative efforts. Many of these and other artistic characters mirror King’s own real-life experiences; for example, the artist at the center of 2008’s Duma Key reflects his physical struggle to write following a highly publicized 1999 injury that made writing difficult for several years.

King has also been open throughout his career about his struggles with addictions ranging from alcohol to drug abuse to painkillers, and many of his main characters likewise struggle with addiction — either directly, in books like The Shining and Revival , or indirectly: The villain of Misery , Annie Wilkes, is a metaphor for cocaine itself.

3) World building through geography and repeated characters

Most people associate Stephen King with Maine and Maine with Stephen King. This is because King almost exclusively writes and sets his stories there. The town of Derry, for example, where It lives, is based on Bangor, Maine. Numerous fictional King towns, like Derry, Haven (the location of a 2010 TV series based on King’s mystery novel The Colorado Kid ), and Castle Rock, exist in his works alongside real towns.

King uses these locations to increase the verisimilitude of his stories, painting them as all part of the same fictional universe. In stories like It, he borrows liberally from real places and landmarks, highways and scenery, even real street corners. And while Derry is the most famous of King’s fictional towns, Castle Rock is his most frequent destination, showing up over and over in his works.

King doesn’t only reuse places in his stories, however — he also reuses people. One popular villain, a recurring supernatural figure who may or may not be the devil, appears throughout the Stephen King universe in various guises. In The Dark Tower he’s “the Man in Black”; to the lost souls in The Stand, he’s a leader named Randall Flagg. In other stories, he’s a nebulous cast of characters with the initials “R.F.”

Frequently throughout his books, King will signal that his worlds are all connected by having characters meet characters from other books in passing. King characters also are frequently able to travel between narrative landscapes, with or without their awareness ( The Shining, Gerald’s Game, Bag of Bones, Lisey’s Story ). This interconnectivity becomes the central conceit of the Dark Tower , which explicitly links most of King’s stories together in one vast multiverse and explains that there are metaphysical doors between the worlds that allow all this to happen.

King’s work endures not because of its inherent darkness but because of its inherent hope

Part of the reason it may have taken critics so long to reassess King’s work is that “horror” implies the lower rungs of emotion King speaks of in Danse Macabre — the gross-outs and the physical gags that play into our understanding of the genre. But the key to his popularity as a horror novelist, and as a novelist in general, resides not in the darkest moments of his writing, but in his basic belief in humanity’s innate goodness.

He spells out his essentially hopeful, fundamentally romantic worldview in a 1989 interview :

There must be a huge store of good will in the human race. ... If there weren’t this huge store of good will we would have blown ourselves to hell ten years after World War II was over. ... It’s such a common thing, those feelings of love toward your fellow man, that we hardly ever talk about it; we concentrate on the other things. It’s just there; it’s all around us, so I guess we take it for granted ... I believe all those sappy, romantic things: Children are good, good wins out over evil, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I see a lot of the so-called “romantic ideal” at work in the world around us.

It’s this core optimism, more than his ability to scare us, that makes King so beloved by readers. Even in his bleakest works, he retains his ability to empathize deeply with his characters, and to see even his monsters as fundamentally human.

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Stephen King

Stephen King is a 'New York Times'-bestselling novelist who made his name in the horror and fantasy genres with books like 'Carrie,' 'The Shining' and 'IT.' Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV.

Who Is Stephen King?

Stephen King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. He graduated from the University of Maine and later worked as a teacher while establishing himself as a writer. Having also published work under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, King's first horror novel, Carrie , was a huge success. Over the years, King has become known for titles that are both commercially successful and sometimes critically acclaimed. His books have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide and been adapted into numerous successful films.

Early Life and Education

Stephen Edwin King was born on September 21, 1947, in Portland, Maine. King is recognized as one of the most famous and successful horror writers of all time. His parents, Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King, split up when he was very young, and he and his brother David divided their time between Indiana and Connecticut for several years. King later moved back to Maine with his mother and brother. There he graduated from Lisbon Falls High School in 1966.

King stayed close to home for college, attending the University of Maine at Orono. There he wrote for the school's newspaper and served in its student government. While in school, King published his first short story, which appeared in Startling Mystery Stories . After graduating with a degree in English in 1970, he tried to find a position as a teacher but had no luck at first. King took a job in a laundry and continued to write stories in his spare time until late 1971, when he began working as an English educator at Hampden Academy. It was that year that he also married fellow writer Tabitha Spruce.

King of Thrills and Chills

While making novels about vicious, rabid dogs and sewer-dwelling monsters — as seen in Cujo and IT , respectively — King published several books as Richard Bachman. Four early novels — Rage (1977), The Long Walk (1979), Roadwork (1981) and The Running Man (1982) — were published under the moniker because of King's concern that the public wouldn't accept more than one book from an author within a year. He came up with the alias after seeing a novel by Richard Stark on his desk (actually a pseudonym used by Donald Westlake) coupled with what he heard playing on his record player at the time — "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet," by Bachman Turner Overdrive.

Television and Film Adaptations

Although many of King's works were made into film or TV adaptations — Cujo and Firestarter were released for the big screen in 1983 and '84 respectively, while It debuted as a miniseries in 1990 — the film The Shining , released in 1980 and starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall , became a renowned horror thriller that has stood the test of time.

For a good portion of his career, King wrote novels and stories at a breakneck speed. He published several books per year for much of the 1980s and '90s. His compelling, thrilling tales have continued to be used as the basis of numerous films for the big and small screens. Actress Kathy Bates and actor James Caan starred in the critically and commercially successful adaptation of Misery in 1990, with Bates winning an Oscar for her performance as the psychotic Annie Wilkes.

Four years later, The Shawshank Redemption , starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman and based on one of his stories, became another acclaimed outing with multiple Oscar nominations. King's 1978 novel The Stand became a 1994 miniseries with Molly Ringwald and Gary Sinise in the lead, while the mid-'90s serialized outing The Green Mile was turned into a 1999 prison-based film starring Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan .

King continues to create and be involved in provocative projects. He has worked directly in television, writing for series like Kingdom Hospital and Under the Dome , with the latter based on his 2009 novel. In 2011, he published 11/22/63 , a novel involving time travel as part of an effort to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy .

King also wrote Joyland (2013), a pulp-fiction style thriller that takes readers on a journey to uncovering who's behind an unsolved murder. And he surprised audiences by releasing Doctor Sleep (2013), a sequel to The Shining , with Sleep hitting No. 1 on the New York Time s bestseller list.

The novelist then published Mr. Mercedes (2014), with Finders Keepers (2015) and End of Watch (2016) rounding out the crime trilogy. In 2017, he teamed with son Owen to deliver Sleeping Beauties , about a mysterious pandemic that leaves women enveloped in cocoons. That year he polished off another collaboration, with Richard Chizmar, on the novella Gwendy's Button Box .

Meanwhile, adaptations of King's works have continued to populate the big and small screens. In 2017, the first season of Mr. Mercedes began airing on the Audience Network, while a remake of the horror classic IT enjoyed a hefty box-office haul. In 2019, an adaptation of Doctor Sleep and IT Chapter Two hit theaters, along with a reboot of another signature King property, Pet Sematary.

That year also brought the publication of the tireless writer's 61st novel, The Institute , about children with supernatural abilities who are taken from their parents and incarcerated by a mysterious organization.

Personal Life

King and his novelist wife divide their time between Florida and Maine. They have three children: Naomi Rachel, a reverend; Joseph Hillstrom, who writes under the pen name Joe Hill and is a lauded horror-fiction writer in his own right; and Owen Phillip, whose first collection of stories was published in 2005.

In honor of his prolific output and success in his craft, King was among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts in 2015.

Outside of writing, King is a music fan. He even sometimes plays guitar and sings in a band called Rock Bottom Remainders with fellow literary stars like Dave Barry, Barbara Kingsolver and Amy Tan . The group has performed a number of times over the years to raise money for charity.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Stephen Edwin King
• Birth Year: 1947
• Birth date: September 21, 1947
• Birth State: Maine
• Birth City: Portland
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Stephen King is a 'New York Times'-bestselling novelist who made his name in the horror and fantasy genres with books like 'Carrie,' 'The Shining' and 'IT.' Much of his work has been adapted for film and TV.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Virgo
• Durham Elementary School
• University of Maine
• Lisbon Falls High School

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Stephen King Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/stephen-king
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 30, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• [French is] the language that turns dirt into romance.
• We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.
• As a writer, I've always been confrontational. I've never been cool, I've never been calculating.
• There are plenty of people who have got lots of talent. This world is lousy with talent. The idea is to work that talent and try to get to be the best person that you can, given the limits of the talent that God gave you — or fate, or genetics or whatever name you want to put on it.

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Paul auster's writing routine: "it doesn’t come easy. but the difficulty is part of the pleasure.", lee child's writing routine: "i have no idea what the plot is going to be.".

What I’ve Learned: Stephen King

“I’ve been in recovery a day at a time for a long time now.”

Fame is a pain in the ass. The older you get, the more of a pain in the ass it is. But you have to realize that it comes with the territory. It’s just part of what you do.

There’s this old Spanish saying: “God says, ‘Take what you want and pay for it.’  ” That’s the case with being famous.

I knew a lot when I was seventeen. But since then, it’s been a constant process of attrition.

You can’t think of writing as an adult pursuit or anything that’s important. That’s a good way to turn into a gasbag and start to think that you’re really fucking important. You’re not. You just do your work.

I have to work every day because I have to keep it fresh. If you take a few days off, it all starts to look kind of tacky—like an old campaign poster that’s running in the rain.

It doesn’t always work. I’ve got stories that just ram up against a brick wall. They’re in my right desk drawer. I don’t look in there.

If it’s a good review, it can be dismissed. If it’s a bad review, well, then that’s something you obsess over a little bit.

The important thing about failing is that it should always be a learning experience.

When I have a good idea, I just know. It’s like if you have a bunch of cut-glass goblets set up and you’re hitting them with a spoon. Clunk, clunk, clunk. And then one goes ding.

In every marriage, after the shine is off, then you get down to the serious work of building a relationship.

You can’t let the sun go down on your anger. These all sound like fucking platitudes. They become platitudes for a reason.

Be there for your kids. Say yes. Say yes as much as you can.

What would I tell my twenty-year-old self? Stay away from dope and stay away from booze. Because you have a tendency to go too far.

I’ve been in recovery a day at a time for a long time now. All I know is what works for me: staying out of the wine aisle in Publix.

They say that you don’t go to a whorehouse to listen to the piano player, and if you hang around the barbershop, sooner or later you’re going to get your hair cut. So I try to stay away from temptation.

I like to use my imagination. I like to go for walks. I dig the world in general.

Ten percent of my tweets are political because every now and then, I just get so irritated about something. It doesn’t change anybody’s mind, but it’s good to be able to say it. In the meetings that I go to, we say, “You have to claim your chair.” Sometimes I feel like, yeah, I have to claim my chair.

There’s this saying that if you’re not a liberal in your teens, you don’t have a heart, and if you’re still a liberal in your twenties and thirties, you don’t have a brain.

I think that, actually, if you’re a liberal in your teens, you probably don’t have a brain. And if you’re not a liberal by the time you’re in your thirties and forties, you don’t have a heart.

If you ask what I learned from my accident, it would be: Number one, stay on the sidewalk. I was walking in the country, and the guy came over the hill and hit me.

Other than that, you learn about pain. But it doesn’t do any good, because you forget. The body has a way of forgetting the trauma. I suffered a lot, and the writing helped me because it took me away. That’s probably a healthy thing. You don’t want to live your life in a defensive crouch.

I can cook fish a thousand different ways, but I’m also one hell of a breakfast cook. I make a great cheese omelet.

I’d like to be known as somebody who died merry—who did his work as best as he could and was decent to other people.

I think what people will say is “This is the scary guy—the guy who wrote the horror novels.” But I’d like to be known as somebody who was just a decent human being.

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Tributes pour in for scott wampler after death of beloved kingcast co-host and film writer, share this article.

Scott Wampler, a veteran film writer, co-host of the popular Stephen King podcast The Kingcast and one of the singularly hysterical voices on social media, has died.

His Kingcast co-host Eric Vespe shared the news of Wampler’s death on Friday evening, hailing his collaborator and friend as “hilarious, infuriating, singular.”

Wampler wrote for publications like the former Birth.Movies.Death .,  Fangoria and  Collider. He  became better known on Twitter (X) for his gregarious persona and gut-busting commentary on pop culture as well as his devoted affinity for all things horror and King in particular.

The Kingcast , a Fangoria production, quickly turned into one of the preeminent pop culture podcasts in the space, one the legendary author himself appeared on as a guest .

Fangoria ‘s Phil Noble Jr. lamented Wampler with news of his death .

“We’re devastated to report that Fango contributor and podcast co-host Scott Wampler has died,” Noble wrote in a statement. “Details are scarce at present but, from what we understand, he passed suddenly and without any suffering, which is giving us some small measure of comfort right now. The loss is immeasurable, and tonight we mourn with Scott’s family and friends.”

Tributes poured in for Wampler and his unforgettable impact, including one from King and some from various great directors in the horror space who recognized how much the writer and podcaster impacted the medium.

I don’t know what to say right now other than he was a singular presence. Hunter Thompson would have called him “one of God’s own prototypes, a high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production.” That’s the Scott I knew. Hilarious, infuriating, singular. — Eric Vespe (@EricVespe) May 31, 2024

Awfully sorry to hear that Scott Wampler has died. — Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 1, 2024

I am absolutely gutted, shocked, and devastated to learn that Scott Wampler has passed away. He was a force, a friend, a collaborator, and one hell of a fantastic individual. I can't find the words. — Mike Flanagan (@flanaganfilm) June 1, 2024

Scott was loved, loved, loved and he lived a full life and one that was brimming with passion and many deep friendships. @EricVespe I send you much light and love. I am here if you need me- https://t.co/yFXFa0X47v — Guillermo del Toro (@RealGDT) June 1, 2024

We lost Scott Wampler ( @ScottWamplerRIP ) today. He was one of the brightest lights in the genre film community. Always engaging, highly intelligent and disarmingly funny. This is a very sad day for all of us who knew him. He will be greatly missed. — N O S ⋊ Ɔ I ᴚ ᴚ Ǝ ᗡ ⊥ ⊥ O Ɔ S (@scottderrickson) June 1, 2024

Oh man…Scott Wampler was a truly singular force; passionate, hilarious and loved by everyone who knew him. My heart is with his friends and family. What a shocking loss. — Elijah Wood (@elijahwood) June 1, 2024

I don’t even know what to say. All jokes will be slightly less funny without Scott around. He was one of the great ones. — Kate Siegel (@k8siegel) June 1, 2024

Told someone recently that they were a phenomenal writer because I’m trying to express admiration more often in daily life. I’m reminded of this with the massive outpouring for Scott Wampler, who was so clearly adored. Tell people while they’re here. You won’t regret it. — Brian Tallerico (@Brian_Tallerico) June 1, 2024

My most recent conversation with Scott Wampler was about imported licorice from Australia vs the Netherlands. This was a guy who was enthusiastic about everything. A real sad day. — Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) May 31, 2024

Scott Wampler was such an oversized character on social media that for better or worse it feels appropriate to eulogize him here. He was tremendously funny, and was always kind and supportive of me with a generosity I won't forget. It's a big loss, and I'll miss him a great deal. — Todd Gilchrist (@mtgilchrist) May 31, 2024

Will never forget Scott Wampler's ebullient, irascible charm that burst through the timeline. A singular spirit. I guested on a @Kingcast19 Patreon ep about all the CARRIES in the depths of the pandemic and we had a ball. He was very loved, sending all my best to his closest. — Katie Walsh (@katiewalshstx) June 1, 2024

Can't really find the words to express how sad I am by the sudden loss of Scott Wampler, which is a problem that he never had. A fiercely loyal pal that I could always count on for a laugh and who would rightfully destroy me for displaying a fraction of sentimentality. — Spencer Perry (@TheSpencerPerry) June 1, 2024

Hardest Scott Wampler ever made me laugh was on here. He posted about how if during the course of doing his job he found himself on the Christmas card list of someone obscenely rich and famous he would try to make a point to send them something back and offered this as an example pic.twitter.com/3lNBlaofFE — Richard Swift (@SwiftofOpal) June 1, 2024

Scott Wampler and I served on the front lines of the internet (news editors at sites with active comments sections) at the same time, and the esprit de corps was as hilarious and genuine as you’d hope. He cheered me up immensely, as he did everybody. Love to his friends. RIP — Katie Rife (@RifewithKatie) June 1, 2024

I was feeling self-conscious about playing non-comedy songs at our first shows in Chicago and I had this exchange with Scott Wampler. I’ve thought about it every show since then. Heartbroken to hear of Scott’s passing. pic.twitter.com/SAeAED7FBL — “Big Nick” Lutsko (@NickLutsko) June 1, 2024

Sometimes Twitter can still be good, like all the love (and the jokes) that went out last night for Scott Wampler, a guy who knew very well what this place was good for, and demonstrated it. — Jesse Hawken (@jessehawken) June 1, 2024

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