Writer's Notebook (tips and guides)

Stephen King's Top 13 Writing Tips For Writing Not Just Horror Tropes

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 result is a Frankenproduct that contains a mishmash of random features.

We can avoid "feature creep" in our writing by eliminating everything that doesn't drive the main narrative forward in a meaningful way.

3. "Write with the door closed. Rewrite with the door open."

"Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it." -Stephen King

I'm frequently tempted to show my half-baked stories to friends. Especially when I'm excited about something, it's hard to resist sharing it with the world. But then I remember King's wise advice: "Write with the door closed."

To me, that quote means I need to put in the hard work to produce something before I go around raving about it. Talking is too easy.

"Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources." - Ryan Holiday

Only after I've finished my first draft do I allow myself to show it to others to gather their feedback.

4. Don't dress up your vocabulary.

"One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more
embarrassed." -Stephen King

Sometimes the first thing I write comes out stuffy and unrelatable. I try too hard and force what I'm trying to say rather than writing in a natural style.