What if, a family was stuck in a car because a rabid dog would not let them out? What if, an obsessed fan kidnaps a popular author and demands he pen his next novel just for her? Instead of plot, King says he often starts with a scenario and asks himself, ‘what if?’ Try excavating bones with such a monstrosity and the entire fossil is likely to break. However, ‘plot’ should be thought of as a huge jackhammer, not a delicate tool. The tools used to excavate the fossil must be gentle in order to not break a thing - but understand that even under such careful attention, bones still will break. The reader should discover the fossil as the writer does. Your job is to reveal the fossil to the reader as you uncover it. You must use delicate tools to excavate the bones. The fossil could turn out to be a little bird (a short story), or it could turn out to be a huge dinosaur (a long novel). Uncover the story as if you were excavating a fossil. I got it.Īnother excellent point King makes related to writing, but probably also related to finding your place, and probably how he would answer me when I say I cannot find a place to ‘get in the zone’ and write on a consistent basis, is this: ‘if you want it bad enough, you will find your place.’Ĥ. And sometimes, he would be so in the zone that he would skip his stop and continue on the subway until it circled back to his destination. He was on the train for at least an hour each way and the people in and out of the doors created a din that allowed Butler to enter a zone aspiring writers can only hope they ever encounter. But he had no choice but to be on the train to go to work. With its incessant racket a subway seems counter to this theory of finding a place with no distractions. In an intense workshop back in college, Robert Olen Butler once explained that he wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, ‘A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain,’ while riding on the subway to and from work everyday. So don’t wait for your muse, you must find a place and go there everyday, then your muse will know where you go and hopefully someday, if you’re lucky, he will sprinkle some of his magic dust over your pen, but you should not wait for him to do so. And he will not be sexy and beautiful, he may be grumpy, lazy and full of warts. He will not come find you, you must go find him. Your muse lives in the basement, he says. Ambient music is okay, but TV and the internet are the enemies. In order to write, you must have a place you can go to block out the rest of the world, to keep out any distraction or intrusion, and your brain must know this place is only to write. He means this literally in his case, but also figuratively. Instead, you must go to the basement and close the door. In ‘On Writing’ Stephen King explains that you can not wait for your muse to stimulate you into writing. Find Your Place & Close the Door A concept taught to me in creative writing classes, and now again in Stephen King’s book, that still eludes me is finding a time and place to write. On making time for reading, King points out that you can and must read everywhere: in the bathroom, on line at a store, in the car (listen to audio books), on the treadmill, as well as in the obvious places like a coffee shop, your bed, the couch, your office.ģ. You must realize there are authors being published, even praised, that you can best. He claims that every good writer ultimately read a book where they thought, ‘I can do better than this.’ And that is they key. King’s advice is to read as much as possible and read as many authors as possible. Who can write if all they ever do is compare themselves to the greatest writers who ever lived? I read stories and novels as if I am reading letters from my gods, and I stand back in awe thinking to myself, ‘I can never do what they do.’ According to Stephen King, this is the kiss of death to an aspiring writer. But one thing Stephen King points out that never occurred to me is that it is okay, and important to read bad stories and bad books. Read Of course, in order to write well, one must read obsessively. Do not overwrite or overindulge, this may come off as magniloquent or pompous and could easily lose a reader.Ģ. Read and digest Strunk and White’s ‘The Elements of Style.’ Understand that you can write simply and still get across complicated story ideas that resonate with a reader. Understand the Basics Know proper grammar. This article was original published at Brain Bankġ. This is my review of all the important aspects I took away after re-reading it almost twenty years later. Secrets to Stephen King’s writing process were revealed in his book, ‘On Writing,’ released in 2000.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |