My wife, whose belief in my literary abilities is clearly not what one might hope, recently bought me a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing, the great man’s half memoir, half how-to book. The “how-to” being how to write.
Thanks, dear.
I read the whole thing in three or four days, which, for me, is super fast. I suspect this will sound odd to many of you, but On Writing is the first Stephen King book I have ever read — having been scared enough for real in my life, horror and horror-adjacent simply isn’t my thing — and it is easy to see why the maestro sells so many books. It is punchy, unflinchingly honest and elegantly written. If you are interested in the craft of writing and haven’t done so already, I thoroughly recommend cracking it open.
That said, On Writing is not so much a how-to book about writing as a guide to being Stephen King. Being Stephen King is (obviously!) great, but the world already has one of those, who, (equally obviously) is not me.
Writers, like all people, are both the same and different. While emphasizing difference is generally the dark road to bigotry and conflict, when it comes to writing, differences are important. There is no point trying to be an oak tree if you sprang from a fir cone.
Stephen King is what some people call a pantser, for seat-of-the-pants writing. He believes that stories are “found,” that you start with a situation (woman and child in broken-down car + rabid dog outside) and write from there, discovering the story along the way (= Cujo). His contempt for outlines and plotting drips from the page.
I, on the other hand, am very much a plotter. If I’m writing something, particularly a mystery like Two Times Murder, I don’t start on chapter one until I have a pretty decent outline. When I write, I want to write, I don’t like wrestling with plot points along the way. Some wrestling always occurs, of course, because no outline is the last word on anything, but it’s the aspiration that counts. My time for writing is short. I don’t want to be delayed — and I absolutely don’t want to get 25,000 words into a project only to “find” there’s no story there after all. The Stephen King method is not for me, and that’s just fine. My brain is wired differently, is all.
Another area of same/different I came across is where to write. I think most writers, certainly yours truly and the great man, feel it’s important to write somewhere you feel comfortable. But comfortable varies. For Stephen King, the place to write is in his study, at a modest desk behind a closed door, particularly for the first draft.
No!
I do have a home office and I do write in it, but only if I have to. It’s too cluttered and too tied to my day job to give me a sense of escape. I much prefer anonymous public spaces, like coffee shops and libraries, where I can be around people without actually having to be social and where, most importantly, there is a bare expanse of table to park my laptop. For some reason, I can’t do my day job if my desk is tidy and I can’t write novels if my surroundings are cluttered, so running off to coffee shops and libraries is the perfect solution.
Unless, of course, some indescribable ass closes your coffee shop. The Costa Coffee on Hanover Street in Edinburgh is just . . . gone! I stood outside the door last weekend for maybe five minutes refusing to believe it before heading up the hill to the Starbucks on George Street, which, let me tell you, is not a suitable alternative. The vibe is wrong. Because, yeah, not any coffee shop or library will do.
I am good for right now because my weekday coffee shop is still here, but what I’m going to do this coming Saturday is very much up for debate. Go to the same coffee shop as during the week, I hear you say? Absolutely not. I have rules about that sort of thing. And when, like the author of On Writing, I can articulate what those rules are, you’ll be the first to know.
It’s likely to be a while.
Why, Costa? Why?