ShelfWriting
On Writing
Also called Stephen King · On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Stephen King's 2000 memoir and writing manual. It's about fiction, but its advice on drafting, cutting and writing for one real reader carries straight over to writing up research.
About the book
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is two books in one. The first part is a short memoir of how Stephen King became a writer: his childhood, the stories he sent to magazines as a teenager, and the lean years with his wife Tabitha before Carrie sold. The rest is a manual on the craft. Scribner published it in 2000.
It has five parts: “C.V.” (the memoir), “What Writing Is,” “Toolbox” (vocabulary, grammar and style), “On Writing” (the advice itself), and “On Living: A Postscript.”
The postscript explains the book’s odd history. King started it in late 1997 and put it aside a few months later. In June 1999 he decided to finish it that summer. On June 19, a van hit him while he was walking along Route 5 in Maine, and he spent three weeks in the hospital. He went back to writing in late July, starting with this book. The postscript describes the accident and how writing helped him recover.
It won the Locus Award for best nonfiction in 2001. A tenth-anniversary edition (2010) added an updated reading list, and a twentieth-anniversary edition (2020) added contributions from his sons, Joe Hill and Owen King.
Why it matters here
This site’s author read it before starting a PhD, alongside Umberto Eco’s How to Write a Thesis and George Orwell’s essays. Eco is strongest on the research, King on the drafting.
What King adds is a working method for drafts. Write the first one fast and alone, without worrying who will read it. Then rewrite it for a reader, and cut. For research, that split matters. A first draft is where you find out what you think and where the gaps are. A second draft is where you make your findings clear enough for someone else to check.
Key ideas
1Read a lot and write a lot
King’s first rule is that there’s no shortcut: a writer has to do both, constantly. Reading shows you what works and what doesn’t, and writing is the only way to get better at it. For researchers, the reading is already part of the job. The daily writing usually isn’t, and it should be.
2Build a toolbox
The “Toolbox” section opens with his uncle Oren hauling a huge handmade carpenter’s toolbox around the house to fix a torn screen, a job that needed one screwdriver. His uncle’s point: carry all your tools, because you don’t know what the job will need. King’s writer’s toolbox has vocabulary and grammar on the top shelf and the elements of style below. Keep the basic tools in reach before you start a job.
3Writing is telepathy
King describes writing as a kind of telepathy: one mind sending a picture to another without speaking. To show it, he describes a rabbit in a cage with a blue number 8 painted on its back, and points out that every reader now sees the same 8. Research writing depends on the same transfer. If the reader can’t see what you saw, your findings haven’t reached them.
4Draft with the door closed, rewrite with it open
His summary of the method: “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.” The first draft is private: no audience, no worrying about how it sounds. The second draft is written after other people have read the first, and for them.
5Write for one real reader
King writes every book for one person, his Ideal Reader. For him that’s his wife Tabitha, the person he most wants to make laugh or cry. For researchers, the equivalent is a specific, intelligent reader outside your field, or a colleague who will check your sources.
6Second draft = first draft minus 10%
As a high school senior in 1966, King got a note from an editor calling his work puffy and giving him a formula: cut ten percent in the rewrite. He taped it beside his typewriter. In the book he says anyone who can’t find ten percent to cut isn’t trying.
7Cut the adverbs and the passive voice
His two pet hates are adverbs, especially in dialogue tags, and the passive voice. A strong verb doesn’t need an adverb propping it up, and the active voice says who did what. He also recommends Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style.
Where it shows up here
Write as you go: drafting early and fast, with the door closed, and treating the first draft as a way to find the gaps.
Cut Ten Percent: King’s formula, with Orwell’s six rules, as a method.
Check and share: opening the door: letting other people read, check and respond before you publish.
How to Write a Thesis: Eco on writing for a reader, the research side of the same advice.
What's dated
It’s a book about fiction, and some advice doesn’t transfer. King prefers to start from a situation and let characters find their way out of it, rather than plotting in advance. Research works the other way. You need a question, a plan and, as Eco argues, a provisional table of contents as a working hypothesis. Drafting with the door closed still works, but inside a structure.
Some rules need adjusting for research. Many adverbs in a findings section carry information (“approximately,” “significantly,” “independently”), and cutting them changes the claim. The passive voice is standard in methods sections in some fields. And King’s ten percent applies to prose, not to the caveats and citations that let a reader check your work.
The tone is not for everyone. Kirkus, which liked the book, called its humor sometimes adolescent and cheerfully vulgar, and the examples range from T. S. Eliot to pulp fiction. Some reviewers also found the craft advice familiar from other writing books, and preferred the memoir. The reading list at the back reflects King’s tastes when he wrote it.
Sources & further reading
- Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, official page
- On Writing, Simon & Schuster (publisher’s page)
- Review of On Writing, Kirkus Reviews
- Bev Vincent, review of On Writing, Onyx Reviews
- Timothy Taylor, “Stephen King: The Editor Is Always Right; To Edit Is Divine,” Conversable Economist, 2019
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Wikipedia (structure, editions, reception)
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