Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
September/October 2002

Stephen King’s On Writing:
The Craft of Clear Communication

by Bill Ardis
EBSTC Member

On Writing, Stephen King, Pocket Books, ©2000

Writers are storytellers. Technical writers, like novelists, have a story to tell: the narrative must flow, it must be clear and coherent, it must leave the reader with a sense of completion. The reader can now successfully write JavaScript, use a new QA tool, or better understand the pain and humiliation that Carrie White combated with her telekinetic powers.

Stephen King’s On Writing, now in paperback, is a valuable tool in a writer’s quiver. King discusses here his early years as a writer and his first major success: the sale of paperback rights for Carrie which he wrote and revised on a beat-up manual typewriter resting on a board across his lap in the small house he shared with his wife (novelist Tabitha King) and two children.

“The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars,” King’s agent tells him on the phone. King writes:

"I stood in the doorway, casting the same shadow as always, but I couldn’t talk…. “Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?”

His agent replied that the amount was, in fact, four hundred thousand. King went out and bought a new hair dryer for his wife because he couldn’t think of anything else to get her. When she heard the amount, she began to cry.

Waiting for Your Muse

King knows how to move a story along, and he has little patience for highfalutin’, tutti-frutti ideas about writing. To be a good writer, he says, you’ve got to “read a lot and write a lot.” He spends useful time discussing how to structure a narrative, how to identify the theme which supports all good narratives (what’s the theme of your client’s Methods and Procedures document? It certainly has one!), critical rules of good grammar and syntax, the paragraph as the major organizing element of the narrative, and the importance of strong, clear sentences. “Cut the adverbs!” he says. “Let nouns and verbs do the heavy lifting.” He also reminds us of that splendid writer’s tool, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style.

If you’re waiting for the muse to strike before writing that first novel, don’t wait too long. King tells us that his muse is “a basement guy.” This smelly guy in his torn undershirt is not going to sprinkle fairy dust on your typewriter and cause a Pulitzer Prize winner to appear. He’s smoking stinky cigars and admiring his bowling trophy, waiting for you to get on with your writing. Establish a routine for writing. Stick with it.

Surviving His Own Characters

Finally, King tells the tale of the accident that almost killed him more than two years ago. A distracted driver struck him as he was taking his customary afternoon walk on the shoulder of a roadway near his home. As King, prostrate on the ground beside the road, regains consciousness, it occurs to him that “…I’ve nearly been killed by a character…out of one of my own novels.” King sees this fellow sitting “…on his rock with a cane drawn across his lap” with a look of “pleasant commiseration.” King looks down at his leg, twisted oddly to one side, and croaks to the fellow, “Please tell me the leg is dislocated.” The reply: “Nah. It’s broken in maybe five, six places.” His surgeon later told him that the region below his right knee had been reduced to “so many marbles in a sock.”

King survives the accident to walk again and finish this book, halfway done when the accident occurred. He is a journeyman writer with a practical eye fixed on what good writing means.

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