I have enjoyed the two or three Stephen King books that I have read. He is a very talented writer and I was ecstatic to read Lauren Passell’s Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules For Writers. A lot of the advice that he gives for writers falls in line with what I have learned in Professor Friends writing class. Some things that he mentions are not focusing too much on grammar when writing, avoiding adverbs , writing with personalized style and a couple more pieces of advice that I am not going to list. (Interested in knowing more? Go to: Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules For Writers – B&N Reads (barnesandnoble.com) There was an interesting piece of advice that I honestly did not expect to come from a writer. King mentions the two secrets to success, he says ” I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married.” I can kind of understand the staying physically healthy because healthy body, healthy mind. But staying married? I have no idea what that might have to do with successful writing.
It is unfortunate that that there are countries outside of America that do not have the resources to properly learn and teach reading and writing. Doris Lessing in On not winning the Nobel Prize mentions that in the people in north-west Zimbabwe have scarce resources to teach the kids. The teacher have no textbooks or any material and they are young, like fresh out of high school. Lessing says “I have seen a girl, perhaps not more than twenty, also lacking textbooks, exercise books, biros, seen her teach the A B C by scratching the letters in the dirt with a stick, while the sun beat down and the dust swirled.” These are some very unconventional ways of teaching and they deserve better. Lessing then talks about going to a privileged school where they have a whole library’s worth of books that no one reads. She tries to explain the situation that those in Zimbabwe are going through, but they do not understand. And how could they when all they know is that life that they have lived and experienced. It is crazy to think about how people really take the things that they have for granted because they never realize how lucky they are until it is gone.
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