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Stephen King’s Top 13 Writing Tips
The king of horror can teach us a lot
This past year I’ve been devouring advice books from fellow writers.
By far, the best writing advice I’ve found is Stephen King’s book On Writing. King shares stories that shaped his writing career while offering practical advice for writers and other creative professionals.
Below are the top thirteen lessons I learned from that book.
1. Use failure as fuel.
“By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.” -Stephen King
King put a nail in his wall on which to hang rejection slips from publishers. Each rejection slip was a reminder that he was closer to his breakthrough.
Every one of us faces failure. Each failure is a critical juncture that forks the road into two paths: resignation or perseverance.
Most people won’t continue pushing past their first failure.
However, we should be thankful for failure because it thins out the herd. The strong survive; they benefit from failure’s natural selection because they choose perseverance and push beyond barriers.
2. Remove everything that is not part of the story.
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.” -John Gould’s advice to Stephen King
I get “shiny thing syndrome” when I write. I begin with a single topic in mind that morphs into other concepts. Then I convince myself that those other topics are similar enough to shove into the story, so I jam them in where they don’t belong.
This isn’t just a problem in the world of writing. It happens frequently in business too. Product managers even have a word for it: “feature creep.”
You set out with a defined set of requirements for what a new software feature needs to do, but then you add more features as you go. The end…
