Stephen Kingās Top 20 Rules For Writers
1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. āWhen you write a story, youāre telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.ā
2. Donāt use passive voice. āTimid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes āThe meeting will be held at seven oāclockā because that somehow says to him, āPut it this way and people will believe you really know. āPurge this quisling thought! Donāt be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write āThe meetingās at seven.ā There, by God! Donāt you feel better?ā
3. Avoid adverbs. āThe adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence āHe closed the door firmly.ā Itās by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if āfirmlyā really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before āHe closed the door firmlyā? Shouldnāt this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isnāt āfirmlyā an extra word? Isnāt it redundant?ā
4. Avoid adverbs, especially after āhe saidā and āshe said.ā āWhile to write adverbs is human, to write āhe saidā or āshe saidā is divine.ā
5. But donāt obsess over perfect grammar. āLanguage does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isnāt grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a storyā¦ to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. ā
6. The magic is in you. āIām convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didnāt need the feather; the magic was in him.ā
7. Read, read, read. āYou have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you donāt have time to read, you donāt have the time (or the tools) to write.ā
8. Donāt worry about making other people happy. āReading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.ā
9. Turn off the TV. āMost exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TVāwhile working out or anywhere elseāreally is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, itās time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, Iām afraid, that Geraldo, Keigh Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.ā
10. You have three months. āThe first draft of a bookāeven a long oneāshould take no more than three months, the length of a season.ā
11. There are two secrets to success. āWhen Iām asked for āthe secret of my successā (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. Itās a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. 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. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.ā
12. Write one word at a time. āA radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My replyāāOne word at a timeāāseemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasnāt. In the end, itās always that simple. Whether itās a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like āThe Lord Of The Rings,ā the work is always accomplished one word at a time.ā
13. Eliminate distraction. āThere should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If thereās a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.ā
14. Stick to your own style. āOne cannot imitate a writerās approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You canāt aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.ā
15. Dig. āWhen, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didnāt believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories arenāt souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writerās 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. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes itās enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.ā
16. Take a break. āIf youāve never done it before, youāll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. Itās yours, youāll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. Itās always easier to kill someone elseās darlings that it is to kill your own.ā
17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. āMostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and thatās what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribblerās heart, kill your darlings.)ā
18. The research shouldnāt overshadow the story. āIf you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. Thatās where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what youāre learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.ā
19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. āYou donāt need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in Americaās finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my lifeās work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.ā
20. Writing is about getting happy. āWriting isnāt about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, itās about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. Itās about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.ā
