Any writer’s dream is to produce a good book. If a writer has some guidelines on this, it is so much helpful. Renowned American writer Stephen King gives us some guidelines on how to write a good fiction.
Speaking more about Stephen King, he is a prolific writer with more than fifty novels in his credit. He has captivated millions of people around the world, and earns an estimated $17 million a year. The following points on writing by him are presented by Maggie Zhang to The Independent newspaper. He actually quoted them from King’s memoir, ‘On Writing’. So we’ll see his writing advices.
Stop watching television
Stephen King’s first advice is to read as much as possible. In that, watching television is “poisonous to creativity.” Writers need to look into themselves and turn toward the life of the imagination. To do so, they need to read as much as they can.
In fact, wherever King goes he takes a book with him, and even reads during meals. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” he says. He advises us to read widely, and work constantly, and thereby, refine and redefine your own work.
Stopping writing is a bad idea
King says do not give up writing in the middle of writing. You have to continue it even when you don’t feel like it. “Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea,” he writes. And when you fail, King suggests that you remain positive. “Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”
Don’t try to please people
When writing sometimes you have to criticise things, you have to rude towards people. But instead of rudeness, if you choose to please everybody, it is a bad thing for the work. According to King, rudeness should be the least of your concerns. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway,” he writes.
“If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It’s what I have,” he says. Here, King’s advice is stop worrying, because you can’t please all of your readers all the time.
Write for yourself
Why does someone write? It is because it brings you happiness and fulfillment. King says, “I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.” So when you are on the page, do not think about others, but write for yourself.
Stories are relics
In King’s views, “Writing is refined thinking.” So, “The most important things are the hardest things to say.” Therefore, do not discourage, when you are tackling things that are hardest to write. “They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings.” He points out that most great pieces of writing, are preceded with hours of thought.
When tackling difficult issues, he says, make sure you dig deeply. “Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground ... Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” Hence, writers should be like archaeologists, excavating for as much of the story as they can find.
Write with closed doors; rewrite with open doors
As we all know writing is a fully intimate activity. You cannot do that without being solitude. He suggests when you are ready to write put your desk in the corner of the room, and eliminate all possible distractions, from phones to open windows. “Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open,” he mentions.
You should maintain total privacy between you and your work. Writing a first draft is “completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”
Do not dress up the vocabulary
King does not like rhetorics, especially dress up the vocabulary with rhetorical words. He believes, “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.” Here, he compares this mistake to dressing up a household pet in evening clothes — both the pet and the owner are embarrassed, because it’s completely excessive.
Avoid adverbs and long paragraphs
“The adverb is not your friend,” King describes. “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” He compares them to dandelions that ruin your lawn. According to him, adverbs are worst after “he said” and “she said” — those phrases are best left unadorned.
He also pays attention to paragraphs, so that they flow with the turns and rhythms of the story. “Paragraphs are almost always as important for how they look as for what they say,” says King.
Don’t get overly caught up in grammar
Writing is primarily about seduction, not precision. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes,” writes King. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.” You should strive to make the reader forget that he or she is reading a story at all.
Master the art of description
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s,” states King. So the important part isn’t writing enough, but limiting how much you say. His believes when writing visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. There, you need to describe things “in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,” he says.
As king suggests the key to good description is clarity, both in observation and in writing. Therefore, use fresh images and simple vocabulary to avoid exhausting your reader. “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling,” notes King.
King does not like to give too much background information. “What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story,” writes King. “The latter is good. The former is not.” Hence, when writing, make sure you only include details that move your story forward and that persuade your reader to continue reading.
He also says that if you need to do research, ensure it doesn’t overshadow the story. Research belongs “as far in the background and the backstory as you can get it,” says King. As he puts, you may be entranced by what you’re learning, but your readers are going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.
Write what people actually do
King does not like to write unreal things. So he writes, “Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do — to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.”
King emphasises that the people in your stories are what readers care about the most, so acknowledge all the dimensions your characters may have. In the end, write about what people actually do, not fantasy.