Book Review | On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

This book had me annotating like a crazy person. I think if Stephen King saw the number of post-it notes I have on my copy, he would mighty disapprove. What’s clear from his book is that he is a strong believer in going with the flow – a sentiment that rings true in my writer-heart but I am incapable of doing with this anxious brain.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is part biography and part collection of tips for an aspiring writer in fiction. The book is like a step-by-step writing guide that is structured in a very intuitive way. King starts off with the simplest thing: where to write. He then takes the reader through when to write, what to write about, how to write and how to edit your own manuscript. He looks at the significance of symbolism and theme. He gives ample examples to illustrate each point and he hit most of the questions I had when I started writing.

Let me be honest: I have read only one Stephen King novel and it’s not even one of the famous ones. I read Tommyknockers in 10^th grade and it took me a very long to finish it. At the time, I had cribbed about how the language style kept changing through the book and how it was a little too big for one where not much happens.

Over the years, the book grew on me. I never could articulate why I kept remembering this strange story about aliens and a telepathic typewriter until I read On Writing.

What I liked about King’s writing style in this book is that he does not take himself seriously. The result is a book that is more like a conversation about rather than a lecture on how to write. Here is one of my favourite paragraphs from the book. He talks about the muse – the much sought-after source of inspiration for writers:

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. (…) You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you.”

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

One topic that keeps coming up in the book is King's disdain for television. He, time and again, asks us to 'blow up' our TV sets so it doesn’t eat into our reading hours - a suggestion that I found endearing at times (in the way you feel endearment when your parent tells you about old advertisements they grew up watching), but also a bit outdated.

“And how much of a sacrifice are we talking about here? How many Frasier and ER reruns does it take to make one American life complete? (…) You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward a life of imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keith, Obermann, and Jay Leno must go.”

Maybe the reason I couldn’t relate to this was because I am not American, and a few parts in this book are very America-centred.  But haven't many of us learnt to love storytelling through watching TV? So much of storytelling and imagination, for me, involves Movies and TV shows. I see how they do not offer the subtlety a book does. Maybe, Frasier and ER are those shows that cause the death of your final living brain cell. But I still don’t see how a show like ER won’t at least teach you how to write tension into your story. As people who have graduated in medicine from Grey’s Anatomy University (or Dill Mill Gaye University), won’t we vouch that if we had to write a book about a hospital, we would hugely adopt from these shows. Sure, talking to yourself is weird, but Fleabag asks you, 'why not write a story about it?' 

In spite of some of the tips not holding up in 2021, King captures the overall spirit of writing.

“What are you going to write about? (…) Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth.”

For King, writing a little of ourselves into our stories is what sets a story apart. That’s what makes it a story about a truth – My truth. Our truth. I guess this is the reason Tommyknockers is a story that stayed with me. Yes, it was about aliens and it was about telepathic typewriters in an era much before Siri and Alexa. But it told the truth – the truth about fear, about exhaustion, about feeling trapped. King thought about how people would behave in a situation where aliens did tommyknock around in their head and he wrote the truth about that. 

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is really useful for aspiring writers, of course. But the last section of the book is a good read for anyone. It is a look into how writing has brought King back, time and again, from difficult falls in his life. In King's own words, there is magic in writing.

My overall rating? ★★★.5

Have you read this book? Let me know what you thought about it. If you haven’t read it yet, would you read it?