Name: Bad Writing Advice from Stephen King's ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT
Uploaded: 2024-09-19T17:10:18.000Z
Duration: 28 min 54 s
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Past simple

Back in the year 2000, Stephen King published his book, On Writing, a memoir of the craft.

Since then, it's become the go-to book for new writers.

The superlative

It's hard to find a list of books for writers that doesn't include this one, and if you look at the best books for writers on Goodreads, this one is number one.

The only problem is, it's packed full of bad, unhelpful advice for new and amateur writers.

In this video, I'm going to walk you through the bad advice in the book, why it's wrong, and what you can actually do to level up your craft as a writer.

I'm the CEO of StoryGrid, where we help you build the skills, write a book, and leave your legacy.

My partner Sean Coyne is the creator and founder of StoryGrid, and he is a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience.

Let me tell you something about Steve King.

Steve King wishes he could write like me.

So first off, I'm a big fan of Stephen King.

I love his writing in Green Mile, Gwendy's Button Box, Joyland, Needful Things, and many other books.

And what I love about Stephen King is he loves writing.

He loves the storytelling, the act of writing, everything that goes into it.

The only problem is, it's not very helpful to new writers.

The thing is that Stephen King submitted his first story for publication to a magazine called Spaceman way back in 1960.

Fast forward 14 years, it's 1974, and he publishes his first book, Carrie, which went on to be a huge bestseller, and he was 26 years old.

By the year 2000, when On Writing came out, he was 53 years old and had been writing for over 40 years.

And all of this extensive knowledge and experience as a writer leads to three problems with this book.

The first problem is he's forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.

The last time he was a newbie writer, he was a tween.

First of all, just try to think back to when you were a tween and anything you were doing at that point.

And then think about something that you've been doing for over 40 years.

It's almost impossible to put yourself back in the shoes of a beginner.

Which leads us to the problem number two.

The advice given in this book is from someone that knows how to consistently write well.

So much advice in the book is tied to this idea that he can write consistently well, and so his first drafts are pretty good.

He doesn't require a ton of editing because he's an expert that's been doing this, and that is not the position new and amateur writers find themselves in.

Problem number three is that almost everything he does in writing is intuitive.

What you find when you work with professional writers is that most of them do it very intuitively, and they don't really understand how they do it.

However, if you ask them how they write, they will talk for a long time.

They just won't say stuff that will actually help you become a better writer.

There is a huge gap between being really good at something and being able to teach something.

This is why Tiger Woods, even at the height of his golf career, still had a golf coach.

Because being able to do something is different than being able to teach it.

So now let's just break down the bad advice, and I'm just going to start with the just straight up condescending bits of this book.

About halfway through the book, he pauses to give his thesis, and part of that thesis is this.

While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.

I became a competent writer, and now I'm a pretty good writer.

We're going to lay great writer off to the side, because it's even hard to wrap our heads around what that is.

But this idea that you can't be a bad writer and then become a competent and then good writer is just nuts.

Like, again, if I went back to when he was 10 years old and trying to write, I'm sure his first writing was bad writing, and yet he's forgotten what that's like.

And we see this all the time in the story grid, is we can take somebody that's just a legitimately bad writer, and if they learn the basic skills, they can become a competent and good writer.

This is where he addresses this idea of talent.

He says that talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless.

In the context of this passage, what he's saying is writing shouldn't feel like work.

You should be excited to sit down and write.

And if it feels like work, then you don't have the talent.

And again, I just don't think this is true.

Most of us that are coming to writing when we're later in life, the problem is we've wanted to do it a long time, and now we're actually trying to sit down and do it.

And just because it takes some work to get us in that chair and typing the words, doesn't mean we don't have this magical thing called talent.

What we do have is responsibilities and jobs and decades of voices in our head from family members saying we're wasting our time.

We have all of those things that we're trying to work past.

So when I read this, I feel like it can just be really demoralizing if you're a new writer just trying to get in the seat and start writing.

And you read this, and you think, well, maybe I just don't have the talent.

Next up, let's look at this advice around read a lot and write a lot.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others.

There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of.

If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.

I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words.

That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a good-ish length for a book, something in which the reader can happily get lost.

And because I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll also suggest that you take one day a week off, at least to begin with.

You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot.

And the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.

Now, I have a whole video dedicated to this advice of read a lot and write a lot, and why it isn't true, and it doesn't work, and it is full of this idea of survivorship bias.

But I'm just going to stop here and say, this idea that the only way that you can learn writing is to just churn out 1,000 words a day and then read a lot of books is, again, kind of nuts.

First of all, there's lots of people that read a lot, and they can't write.

There's lots of people that write a lot, and they also are writing bad.

This is what we teach all the time at Story Grid, that there are basic skills that you can learn as a writer, and actually focusing on those and working on those is a shortcut.

It's still hard work, but it's not random.

This idea that you just read a lot and then churn out 1,000 words a day and write these really long manuscripts where none of it works, and you just kind of hope one day it'll work, that's not how writing and learning how to write should work.

It should be a systematic process of learning skills.

So if you want to hear more about this, go down the description.

I have a link to my video talking about this myth of read a lot and write a lot.

About a third of the way through the book, Stephen King introduces this idea of a toolbox.

I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you.

Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.

The idea that you have a toolbox and then you're going to put tools in there and build up the skills to use those tools is exactly what we teach at Story Grid.

But when we talk about what these skills are, this is where I split ways from Stephen King and what he writes and on writing.

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Bad Writing Advice from Stephen King's ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT

weird

specific

basically

practice