Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writers reads like a self-help book but for writers. He takes us through 20 rules he uses for himself in hopes of helping other writers in a non-rigid way. Some rules, like “Take a break” and “The magic is in you,” can relate to anyone and I think they are used as a way of connecting all kinds of different people. Rather than the “Avoid adverbs” emphasis he made in two separate rules,. He said it was because the adverb should already be described in the previous sentence shown through the character but I disagree. For me, adverbs add some ‘spice.’ For example, if I had just described my character opening the door in a way people didn’t get, adding “firmly” to the next sentence would help them get it. He did say in the beginning that these ‘rules’ can be used lightly as a guide so I respect our differences already. I like how he talked about grammar the way we talked about it in class; it’s not the most important thing in any writing. Although this list is long, as a Stephen King fan, I think I can take some of these tips into my own writing.
The Doris lecture, Not Winning the Nobel Prize, was touching and eye-opening. Doris takes us through her time spent in a village in Zimbabwe, where people begged for books. People, not just students, wanted to read anything they could get their hands on because they barely had any and the ones available weren’t affordable. She mentions how some of their libraries are just planks under a tree. Almost like the wealthy kids she talked to in London, it is hard to grasp that level of poverty. Of course, there is poverty here, homeless people, and even I went through not having money and a single mom who had to work two jobs. But even living in my grandma’s tiny apartment with my whole family, we still had access to books. I was still in school, learning how to read and write. Its sad that this is some people’s reality but it’s such an important story to tell. It just goes to show how everyone and anyone can read and write anything of any nature if only given the opportunity. I am grateful for language and my easy access to it.
“The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.”
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