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WillowOne's Positions

On Writing

Overview

Subtitled A Memoir of the Craft. The first third is autobiography: a childhood of rejection slips nailed to a bedroom wall, the laundry job, the trailer, the sale of Carrie, and the years of alcoholism and cocaine he barely remembers writing through. The middle is the toolbox: vocabulary, grammar, the case against adverbs and the passive voice, the second draft as the first draft less ten per cent, writing with the door closed and rewriting with the door open, and the advice to read a great deal and write every day. The last section describes the van that hit him in 1999 and nearly killed him, and the return to the desk.

Notes

The best short book on writing plainly that I know, and the one that most shaped how I write these notes. King's rules are the right rules: say what happened, cut what does not earn its place, do not decorate, and trust the reader. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs" is a joke that is also true. I have no great interest in his novels and that does not matter; he is describing a craft, and he describes it honestly, including the part where talent is not the thing that separates people who finish from people who do not.

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