Stephen King Tells It Like It Is

Edmund Dulac's 'The Ebony Horse'

I’m no Stephen King, but I have been an honest-to-goodness paid professional writer for the past 15 or so years. And every time I read this wonderful bit from Mr. King, Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: In Ten Minutes, I am struck with the raw, perfect truth of it. (Even though it was written in 1986! Before they even had teh innernets!)

Some of my favorite bits:

1. Be talented
This, of course, is the killer. What is talent? I can hear someone shouting, and here we are, ready to get into a discussion right up there with “what is the meaning of life?” for weighty pronouncements and total uselessness. For the purposes of the beginning writer, talent may as well be defined as eventual success – publication and money. If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

4. Remove every extraneous word
You want to get up on a soapbox and preach? Fine. Get one and try your local park. You want to write for money? Get to the point. And if you remove all the excess garbage and discover you can’t find the point, tear up what you wrote and start all over again . . . or try something new.

5. Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft
You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time…

Read the whole thing: Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: In Ten Minutes

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