Stephan King is an author who largely writes horror stories. Some of his most famous are The Shining, It, and Pet Cemetery. Aside from the fiction he usually writes he has also written the famous On Writing a Memoir of the Craft. In this book he has twenty rules that every writer should follow. The first rule is to write for yourself first and then worry about the audience. He says when you write you are telling yourself the story, when you rewrite you are removing what isn’t in the story. You must make sure the story works for you before it goes out to the world. In the second rule he tells you never to use a passive voice. The passive voice is for timid writers, you must take charge of the situation.
With the third rule Stephan King tells us not to use adverbs. Adverbs are an unnecessary weight to you sentences and you should work to remove them. If the sentence is part of at scene that is showing us the emotions of the character and what is he doing then the reader doesn’t need to hear the adverb. Stephan King uses “He closed the door firmly.” as an example. King especially tells us to avoid adverbs following “he said” and “she said.” In his book King says “To write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ and ‘she said’ is divine” you should never write adverbs when writing a novel much less following “he said” and “she said.”
The fourth rule is not to obsess over perfect grammar. King says the the purpose of a story is to take the read on a journey. It is not to remind the reader that it is a story at all. King then says that “the magic is in you,” he says that fear is the source of bad writing. A writer must learn to overcome his fear and put his ideas down on the page.
The next rule King tells us to read. The majority of a writer’s job is reading. As you read you learn of the writing styles of others and can use it to refine your own work. “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write,” (King). As a writer one must not worry about making others happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.” (King).
Leave a Reply