On Writing: Difference between revisions

📘 '''''On Writing''''' is {{Tooltip|Stephen King’sKing}}’s hybrid memoir-and-craft guide, pairing scenes from his life with plain-spoken lessons on how writers work and improve.<ref name="S&S20th" />

First published by {{Tooltip|Scribner}} in 2000, it has remained in print through a 10th-anniversary update (2010) and a 20th-anniversary edition that adds material from {{Tooltip|Joe Hill}} and {{Tooltip|Owen King}}.<ref name="SKsite">{{cite web |title=On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft |url=https://stephenking.com/works/nonfiction/on-writing-a-memoir-of-the-craft.html |website=StephenKing.com |publisher=StephenKing.com |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref><ref name="Marmot10th">{{cite web |title=On writing : a memoir of the craft (10th anniversary ed.) |url=https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b38677416 |website=CMC Library Catalog |publisher=Colorado Mountain College |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref><ref name="S&S20th" />

It won the {{Tooltip|Bram Stoker Award for Nonfiction}} and the {{Tooltip|Locus Award for Best Non-fiction}} for works published in 2000.<ref name="HWA2000">{{cite web |title=2000 Bram Stoker Award Winners & Nominees |url=https://bramstokerawards.horror.org/about-the-awards/2000-bram-stoker-award-winners-nominees/ |website=The Bram Stoker Awards |publisher=Horror Writers Association |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref><ref name="Locus2001">{{cite web |title=Locus Awards 2001 |url=https://www.sfadb.com/Locus_Awards_2001 |website=Science Fiction Awards Database |date=12 June 2020 |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref>

In 2011, {{Tooltip|TIME}} placed it on its “All“{{Tooltip|All-TIME 100 Nonfiction”Nonfiction}}” list.<ref name="TIME2011">{{cite web |last=Cruz |first=Gilbert |title='On Writing' by Stephen King |url=https://entertainment.time.com/2011/08/30/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books/slide/on-writing-by-stephen-king/ |website=Time |date=15 August 2011 |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref>

''This outline follows the {{Tooltip|Scribner}} 20th-anniversary trade paperback (2020; ISBN 978-1-9821-5937-5).''<ref name="S&S20th">{{cite web |title=On Writing |url=https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-Writing/Stephen-King/9781982159375 |website=Simon & Schuster |publisher=Scribner |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref><ref name="Marmot505">{{cite web |title=On writing : a memoir of the craft (record 505 contents) |url=https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b61999957 |website=CMC Library Catalog |publisher=Colorado Mountain College |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref>

📖 '''1 – First Foreword.''' In the early 1990s I joined the {{Tooltip|Rock Bottom Remainders}}, a writers’ rock band dreamed up by San Francisco publicist-musician {{Tooltip|Kathi Kamen Goldmark}}, with {{Tooltip|Dave Barry}} on lead guitar, {{Tooltip|Ridley Pearson}} on bass, {{Tooltip|Barbara Kingsolver}} on keyboards, {{Tooltip|Robert Fulghum}} on mandolin, and {{Tooltip|Amy Tan}} among the singers. What was meant to be a one-off at the {{Tooltip|American Booksellers Convention}} turned into occasional tours, with ringers on sax and drums and {{Tooltip|Al Kooper}} as an early musical guru. Before a Miami Beach gig, over Chinese food, I asked Amy what question she never got in reader Q&As; after thinking, she said no one ever asked about the language. I had been toying with a small book on writing for a year or more but distrusted my motives and didn’t want to add to the gas-bag shelf. Her answer put the focus where it belonged: the day job—how stories are told on paper and how prose choices carry that work. The scene sets a nuts-and-bolts tone grounded in names, places, and jobs, framing the book as a study of language and craft. ''This book is dedicated to {{Tooltip|Amy Tan}}, who told me in a very simple and direct way that it was okay to write it.''

🧭 '''2 – Second Foreword.''' I explain that this will be a short book because most writing manuals are padded, and fiction writers—myself included—often don’t fully know why work succeeds or fails. As a counterexample I point to {{Tooltip|William Strunk Jr.}} and {{Tooltip|E. B. White’sWhite}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Elements of Style}}'', a slim eighty-five-page volume notable for its lack of filler. I recommend that every aspiring writer read it, not as scripture but as a model of clear, economical instruction that respects the reader’s time. The tone is blunt and workmanlike, promising guidance that favors directness over mystique and rules of thumb over academic fog. The lesson is economy—cut what doesn’t serve meaning and apply disciplined concision sentence by sentence. ''Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composition is “Omit needless words.” I will try to do that here.''

🗣️ '''3 – Third Foreword.''' I set one more ground rule: the editor is always right, even though no writer accepts every note, because all of us fall short of editorial perfection. To make that concrete, I credit {{Tooltip|Chuck Verrill—whoVerrill}}—who has edited many of my novels—with shaping this book as well. Editing is collaboration, not punishment; it turns human draft into readable prose. A second intelligence can see audience needs and tonal slips the originator misses. Humility drives the work: solitary drafting improves through iterative revision with a trusted editor. ''Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.''

📜 '''4 – C.V..''' {{Tooltip|Mary Karr’sKarr}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Liars’ Club}}'' showed me what total recall on the page looks like; I don’t have that, so I offer snapshots. I was raised by my mother, {{Tooltip|Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King}}, after my father ran out when I was two and my brother David was four, and our moves made childhood herky-jerky. The earliest fixed scene is in Aunt Ethelyn and Uncle Oren’s garage in {{Tooltip|Durham, Maine}}: two and a half or three, I lug a cement cinderblock like the {{Tooltip|Ringling Brothers}} Strongboy, take a wasp sting to the ear, and mash all five toes when the block drops. In {{Tooltip|Wisconsin}} I remember a teenage babysitter, Eula—maybe Beulah—big as a house and laughing with a thunderclap tucked inside it. At six I endured repeated eardrum lancings, the alcohol smell sharp and the needle long. Caught copying a ''{{Tooltip|Combat Casey}}'' comic into a school tablet, I was told to write one of my own, and I did—four pencil-printed pages about four magic animals led by a white bunny named {{Tooltip|Mr. Rabbit Trick}}. This is not a full autobiography—just how a writer formed through shocks, voices, and work. Memory does the lifting: fix small, named details and let them stand for the long road to a working storyteller. ''There are no lines—only snapshots, most out of focus.''

🧠 '''5 – What Writing Is.''' Telepathy is the answer, proved in real time: on a snowy morning in December 1997 I sit at my desk under the eave, you sit somewhere down-timeline, and we still share the same picture. See a table with a red cloth; on it a cage the size of a small fish aquarium; inside, a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes, contentedly working a carrot stub. On the rabbit’s back the number 8 is written in blue ink, and despite distance and time we both receive it. Scientists like {{Tooltip|J. B. Rhine}} tried to measure this, but the better proof is the image now in both our heads. Books make the magic portable; the strongest signals arrive in the private far-seeing place each of us builds for sending and receiving. Precision matters: rough comparisons invite a reader to help, while prissy over-measurement turns prose into an instruction manual. Writing works as a single circuit—writer encodes, reader decodes—when words provide just enough data for the same picture to appear in two minds. ''You must not come lightly to the blank page.''

🧰 '''6 – Toolbox.''' A {{Tooltip|John Prine}} lyric about a carpenter leads to my own: my grandfather, {{Tooltip|Guy Pillsbury}}, kept up the {{Tooltip|Winslow Homer}} place at {{Tooltip|Prout’s Neck}}, and when he retired my Uncle Oren inherited his massive handmade toolbox. It was a big ’un—three tiers with cunning drawers, dark wooden slats bound with brass, big lunchbox-style latches, a silk lining printed with pinkish-red cabbage roses, and grab handles on the sides. As kids we could barely lift it; loaded, it weighed somewhere between eighty and a hundred-twenty pounds, which is why Oren set it down with a sigh before simple jobs like replacing a torn screen. That day he used a single screwdriver to turn eight loophead screws, then explained why he hauled the beast anyway: you don’t know what else a job will ask until you’re there. From that lesson comes the writer’s kit—a portable box you build and carry so you can seize the right tool and begin at once. On the top shelf go the common implements: vocabulary you already own and grammar you keep clean; lower levels hold habits and choices—favor active over passive verbs, use ''said'' for dialogue tags, treat the paragraph as the basic unit, and mind adverbs, especially in tags. Another layer carries rhythm, white space, and preferences you develop through use. Master fundamentals, then add selective tools so you don’t stall when a page asks for more; with practice, the box becomes part of how you move through a story. ''It’s best to have your tools with you.''

✍️ '''7 – On Writing.''' I anchor the workday at a desk shoved into a corner to keep my priorities straight, then build a routine out of pages and hours. Ten pages—about 2,000 words—a day keeps a first draft on a three-month season; beginners can aim for a thousand words with one day off, door shut and distractions killed. The first pass is the {{Tooltip|All-Story Draft}} written fast; then the manuscript rests about six weeks before I read it with a pencil and a legal pad. When the door opens, I listen to my Ideal Reader—Tabitha—andReader—{{Tooltip|Tabitha}}—and a small circle of first readers, not a test audience. Rewriting follows the pink-slip arithmetic I taped to my wall long ago: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft − 10%, cutting what slows pace or explains what the scene already shows. Habit makes the rest possible: read a lot, write a lot, keep the telephone unplugged, and meet the quota even when the words come hard. No talismans—just hours, drafts, and cuts that favor clarity; close the world to draft, then open the door to calibrate with a real reader. ''Life isn’t a support-system for art.''

❤️‍🩹 '''8 – On Living: A Postscript.''' On 19 June 1999 I was three-quarters up a short blind hill on {{Tooltip|Route 5}} between {{Tooltip|Bethel}} and {{Tooltip|Fryeburg}} when a light blue {{Tooltip|Dodge}} van drifted onto the shoulder—my shoulder—under the hands of {{Tooltip|Bryan Smith}}, forty-two. A northbound driver had already watched that van weave; Smith’s rottweiler, {{Tooltip|Bullet}}, had jumped toward an {{Tooltip|Igloo}} cooler of meat and his attention went with the dog. The windshield opened a long gash in my scalp inches from the driver’s-side post; had I hit the post or the rocks beyond the shoulder, I likely would have died. Paramedics routed me by {{Tooltip|LifeFlight}} from {{Tooltip|Northern Cumberland Hospital}} to {{Tooltip|Central Maine Medical Center}} in {{Tooltip|Lewiston}}, where {{Tooltip|Dr. David Brown}} rebuilt my right leg in five marathon surgeries and clamped on an external fixator with eight {{Tooltip|Schanz pins}} that nurses swabbed three times a day. By the Fourth of July I could sit in a wheelchair on the loading dock to watch fireworks; I went home to {{Tooltip|Bangor}} on 9 July and back to the {{Tooltip|OR}} on 4 August. The hinge back into work came sooner: on 24 July—five weeks after the impact—I began to write again, still on a walker, still in pain, but moving sentences forward. Injury, rehab, and a return to the desk show what making pages can do when life is broken; a timetable, a room, and daily reach for language narrow pain and widen attention. ''Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.''

🚪 '''9 – And Furthermore, Part I: Door Shut, Door Open.''' I put a raw example on the bench: “The Hotel Story,” a first draft of what became “1408“{{Tooltip|1408}},” with {{Tooltip|Mike Enslin}} stepping through the revolving door of the {{Tooltip|Hotel Dolphin}} on {{Tooltip|Sixty-first Street}} near {{Tooltip|Fifth Avenue}} while “Night“{{Tooltip|Night and Day”Day}}” floats from the mezzanine bar. The copy is undressed—names ungainly (the manager is {{Tooltip|Ostermeyer}}), stage directions fussy, back story clotted—and I present it exactly as I would with the door shut. Then I show the second draft with the door open: Ostermeyer becomes {{Tooltip|Olin}} via global replace; the pace tightens; a “lucky Hawaiian shirt” moves upfront to obey the theater rule that props introduced early must pay off later; the needless is cut with Strunk in mind. I key the changes, explain what went and why, and restate the rule that has guided my revisions since {{Tooltip|Lisbon High}}: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft − 10%. Along the way I note where the title “1408” comes from (a thirteenth-floor story whose numbers add to thirteen) and point to the story’s later audio appearance in ''{{Tooltip|Blood and Smoke}}''. The demonstration turns revision into visible, repeatable steps—open the door, test the prose, and trim until story outruns explanation. ''This is about engine maintenance, not joyriding.''

📚 '''10 – And Furthermore, Part II: A Booklist.''' After talks about writing, the same question always comes in the Q&A—What do you read?—so I answer with a working list built from the three or four years when I was writing ''{{Tooltip|The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon}}'', ''{{Tooltip|Hearts in Atlantis}}'', ''On Writing'', and the then-unpublished ''{{Tooltip|From a Buick Eight}}''. I name names and titles, not commandments: {{Tooltip|Peter Abrahams’sAbrahams}}’s ''{{Tooltip|A Perfect Crime}}'' and ''{{Tooltip|Lights Out}}'', {{Tooltip|James Agee’sAgee}}’s ''{{Tooltip|A Death in the Family}}'', {{Tooltip|Pat Barker’sBarker}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Regeneration'' trilogy}}, {{Tooltip|Bill Bryson’sBryson}}’s ''{{Tooltip|A Walk in the Woods}}'', {{Tooltip|Michael Connelly’sConnelly}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Poet}}'', {{Tooltip|Joseph Conrad’sConrad}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Heart of Darkness}}'', {{Tooltip|Raymond Carver’sCarver}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Where I’m Calling From}}'', {{Tooltip|T. Coraghessan Boyle’sBoyle}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Tortilla Curtain}}'', and {{Tooltip|Paul Bowles’sBowles}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Sheltering Sky}}'', among many others. The list ranges across crime, literary, historical, and travel writing because a writer’s ear needs variety more than purity. These books influenced the pages I was making—tone, pace, or a nudge toward a different sentence shape. There’s no syllabus here, just a map of reading that proved useful, surprising, and fun. You could do worse than start with any of them, and entertainment is a valid outcome by itself. Steady intake matters: broad, hungry reading sands clichés and furnishes options when a draft thins; exposure to many voices sharpens your own without copying. ''As you scan this list, please remember that I’m not Oprah and this isn’t my book club.''

🎧 '''13 – Owen King: Recording Audiobooks for My Dad, Stephen King.''' In 1987, at age ten, I got my first paid job from my father: a handheld cassette recorder, a block of blank tapes, and {{Tooltip|Dean Koontz’sKoontz}}’s hardcover ''{{Tooltip|Watchers}}'', with nine dollars promised for each finished sixty-minute tape I read into the mic. My track record suggested trouble—during family read-alouds of {{Tooltip|Robert Louis Stevenson’sStevenson}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Kidnapped}}'' I’d tormented everyone with a wobbly Scottish Alan Breck—but I shut my bedroom door, sat beneath a {{Tooltip|Roger Clemens}} poster, and did the work anyway. The experiment stuck. Through my teens I made at least two dozen more home-taped audiobooks, from ''{{Tooltip|A Separate Peace}}'' and ''{{Tooltip|The Fellowship of the Ring}}'' to {{Tooltip|Jim Thompson’sThompson}}’s ''{{Tooltip|The Grifters}}'', {{Tooltip|Edward Anderson’sAnderson}}’s ''{{Tooltip|You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up}}'', {{Tooltip|Frank Herbert’sHerbert}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Dune}}'', and {{Tooltip|Clifford D. Simak’sSimak}}’s ''{{Tooltip|Ring Around the Sun}}''. Speaking every line changed how I read; rhythm, punctuation, and paragraphing became audible problems to solve. Years later I returned the favor at Christmas with ''{{Tooltip|War and Peace}}''—late, imperfect Russian and all—and by then I understood what Dad’s own tapes for me (Greene, Hassler, others) had delivered: pace, shading, and company. Reading aloud became a back-door apprenticeship in voice and timing; say the words, hear the flaws, and carry the lessons back to the page. ''It’s much harder to neglect words when they are coming out of your mouth.''

💬 '''14 – Joe Hill: A Conversation with My Dad.''' On 10 October 2019, {{Tooltip|Porter Square Books}} hosted my dad and me at the {{Tooltip|Somerville Theatre}} in {{Tooltip|Somerville, Massachusetts}}, for a public conversation the twentieth-anniversary edition preserves. It ran roughly an hour and, beyond the jokes, turned on work: how we start, what we cut, what we keep, and why reading fuels all of it. We each read from the other’s writing—an exchange that makes process audible and lets you hear what a trusted reader notices first. The evening landed in the middle of a busy fall—Dad with ''{{Tooltip|The Institute}}'', me with ''{{Tooltip|Full Throttle}}''—but the talk kept circling the same practical ground: drafting fast enough to outrun self-consciousness, revising with a cool head, and listening for the sentence that suddenly sounds false. Live, the back-and-forth shows how family can double as a workshop: questions sharpen, praise narrows, and disagreements point to the cut that matters. Captured on the page and in audio, it reads less like an interview than a working session with a crowd in the room. Writing improves in conversation—with a first reader, with an audience, and with books you’ve loved long enough to quote; reciprocal attention turns readings into edits you can use the next morning.

🖋️ '''Author & writing'''. King positioned the book as both a selective “C.V.” and a practical “textbook” for writers, released in 2000 by {{Tooltip|Scribner}} and available in hardcover, paperback, e-book, and audiobook.<ref name="SKsite" /> After he was struck by a van in June 1999, he describes a slow return to the page as part of recovery.<ref name="Guardian2000" /> The structure runs from “C.V.” and “What Writing Is” through “Toolbox” and “On Writing,” then closes with “On Living: A Postscript.”<ref name="Marmot505" /> The voice is colloquial and directive—daily practice (often about 2,000 words), “the adverb is not your friend,” draft with the door closed before revising for readers.<ref name="Guardian2000" /> A 10th-anniversary edition (2010) updated the reading list, and a 20th-anniversary edition (2020) added new material and pieces by {{Tooltip|Joe Hill}} and {{Tooltip|Owen King}}.<ref name="Marmot10th" /><ref name="S&S20th" /> First-edition bibliographic details for the 2000 {{Tooltip|Scribner}} hardback—288 pages; ISBN 978-0-684-85352-9—are confirmed by major library records.<ref name="NLA2000" /><ref name="Marmot2000OCLC2000">{{cite web |title=On writing : a memoir of the craft (2000) |url=https://cmc.marmot.org/Record/.b11100175 |website=CMC Library Catalog |publisher=Colorado Mountain College |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref> The original audiobook appeared in 2000, unabridged and read by King.<ref name="OCLC50104316" />

📈 '''Commercial reception'''. Upon publication, ''Publishers Weekly'' reported a 500,000-copy first printing in October 2000.<ref name="PW2000">{{cite web |title=On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft |url=https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780684853529 |website=Publishers Weekly |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref> The publisher now bills the title as a “million-copy bestseller” and continues to promote the 20th-anniversary edition and a refreshed audio read by King with {{Tooltip|Joe Hill}} and {{Tooltip|Owen King}}.<ref name="S&S20th" /> The work has remained available across formats since 2000.<ref name="SKsite" />

👍 '''Praise'''. ''The Washington Post'' called it an enjoyable blend of autobiography and instruction, noting how personal memories illuminate craft.<ref name="Wapo2000">{{cite news |last=King |first=Nina |title=Scare Tactics |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/2000/09/24/scare-tactics/27692248-cbbc-4a09-a94e-a37393f6e84b/ |work=The Washington Post |date=23 September 2000 |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref> ''Kirkus Reviews'' singled out the closing account of the 1999 accident as “tightly controlled” and “as good and as true as anything King has written.”<ref name="Kirkus2000">{{cite news |title=On Writing |url=https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/stephen-king/on-writing/ |work=Kirkus Reviews |date=3 October 2000 |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref> ''Publishers Weekly'' highlighted the book’s “valuable advice” for novice writers and its candid, authoritative voice.<ref name="PW2000" />

👎 '''Criticism'''. In ''{{Tooltip|The Guardian}}'', Jay Parini argued that King has “nothing much to say about writing that isn’t obvious,” finding the craft dicta less compelling than the life story.<ref name="Guardian2000" /> ''Publishers Weekly'' observed that the book’s three main parts “don’t hang together much better than those of the Frankenstein monster.”<ref name="PW2000" /> ''The Washington Post'' noted that some readers might bristle at King’s just-folks persona even while finding the mix enjoyable.<ref name="Wapo2000" />

🌍 '''Impact & adoption'''. {{Tooltip|TIME}} placed ''On Writing'' on its 2011 “All“{{Tooltip|All-TIME 100 Nonfiction”Nonfiction}}” list, cementing its status beyond genre and how-to circles.<ref name="TIME2011" /> In higher education, it appears on creative-writing syllabi—for example, Arizona State University’s ENGLISH 394 (Spring 2023) lists ''On Writing'' as a required text.<ref name="ASU2023">{{cite web |title=ENGLISH 394: The Art of Popular Literature — Stephen King (sample syllabus) |url=https://webapp4.asu.edu/bookstore/viewsyllabus/2231/31979/pdf%3Bjsessionid%3D218B14EF79290E551125F618659510EB |website=Arizona State University |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref> U.S. public institutions also recommend it: the Library of Congress’s National Library Service includes ''On Writing'' on its curated “Writing Books” list (catalogued as a 2000 bestseller).<ref name="NLS2024">{{cite web |title=Writing Books |url=https://www.loc.gov/nls/new-materials/book-lists/writing-books/ |website=Library of Congress National Library Service |access-date=8 November 2025}}</ref>

{{Youtube thumbnail | NLfINvRut4I | Full authorAuthor talk at UMass Lowell (98 min)}}

{{Youtube thumbnail | nLS_I9YAUE8 | Animated summary: 3 key lessons (7 min)}}