Writing is a lonely job.
He doesn’t really need to express this so directly and explicitly. The message runs throughout the book, persistently presented through showing rather than this example of telling. In books “on acting” or “on directing” or “on the making of the album” the scenes presented are collaborative. Creative artists sharing their experiences in becoming the type of artist they are generally afford examples of the creative process in action that includes multiple characters apart from themselves. Unless the writer is part of an established collaborate team—like a musician/lyricist or a duo in which one writer essentially handles the description while the other creates the dialogue—when a writer is actually at work writing it is just him. This is why so few really good movies have ever been made about writers. The process itself is not one that is naturally visual and kinetic.
Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.
Stephen King has never been a darling of the critics and the reason may have less to do with his actual fiction than his multiple declarations of things related to the art of writing like this. King is very assertive in this declaration, coming up only half-heartedly with Orwell’s Animal Farm as a possible exception to his stated rule. Almost certainly that is not the case, but it does offer insight into the nature of King as writer. He is a storyteller. His mode of thinking is narrative. Anyone who has read any number of novels written by experimental-minded authors can quickly point out with full assurance that not only did they not start out with story and progress to theme, their writing process never even got around to story. So for those who are looking to King for advice “on writing” be aware that he means writing about stories. That does not mean that writers who wish to follow upon experimenting without narrative cannot learn from the book. In fact, they should probably read it more than those with a natural gift for storytelling.
The adverb is not your friend.
“On Writing” is not just an overview of King’s writing career. In fact, it is not that at all. Those looking to it as a kind of “behind the scenes” of the writing of The Shining or another favorite King novel are going to be disappointed. It covers the gamut from theme to grammar. In fact, it covers the use of grammar more extensively than one might imagine. King takes to task those basic mechanics of producing fiction that irks him most, from passive voice to the subject-verb organization. However, it is the adverb that occupies the lowest run of King’s own version of literary hell. He takes the laziness of the reliance upon adverbs to task over the course of a few pages until he has, all evidence indicates, succeeded in making its evil clear enough that no reader will go on to indulge afterward.
