On re-reading Stephen King's 'On Writing'

The cover of the latest edition of
Stephen King's On Writing

I've just re-read Stephen King's book On Writing for the third time after I found a new edition in the Library and saw that he'd added yet another short Preface to the book. This one is called Joy. It made me want to read the book again, so that's what I've just done. I did borrow the copy from the library, but I then switched to reading my own copy, which I've had for a long time. It's the English Hodder and Stoughton hardback edition from 2000, which I must have picked up secondhand somewhere, and which was one of the books that survived our house shift from Dunedin to Oamaru.

I'd forgotten a lot of the book: the first half is his 'CV,' an interesting and succinctly-written history of how he grew up, and more importantly, how he became a writer. Towards the end of the book there's the section on the time that he was knocked down by a truck near his home. This was followed by a painful recovery and the necessary return to writing as a way, in part at least, of healing. This section is vivid and awful, and it shows how well he writes. 

The 'On Writing' middle section of the book is interesting but again I ponder on his claim that he writes once in first draft, revises and that's pretty much it. He does give a bit of a more detailed description of that process at one point, saying he writes at white heat when he's doing the first draft, aiming for a minimum of 2,000 words a day, even though, like Lee Child, he's basically writing a book without any idea where it will ultimately go. 

He then puts the completed, and unrevised, first draft away for six weeks - refusing to touch it - and it's only after the six weeks are past that he comes back to it, reads it right through, and begins to adjust and cut and get everything in its rightful order. 

It shows his skill in forming an idea into something coherent in one blast, as it were. It's an intutive approach, and my own writing tends to follow an intutive path too. But my whole process takes infinitely longer than his because I find myself going down by-ways and paths with no exits or signposts. It's how I write most of my music too, but again the finished product requires a huge amount of tinkering before I'm satisfied that I've reached the end. 

So the difference between Stephen King and me isn't just that he's much more prolific, even though we usually both start with little more than an idea. It's that he has the ability to take that idea and see into it much more effectively than me. My process is like hacking away at the huge thorny forest that's grown up around Sleeping Beauty's castle and getting well and truly scratched and torn and bruised. 

One other comment. Like so many American writers who've produced a book on how to write, King regards Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as one of the must-have guidebooks to writing. This book was originally written in 1918 by Strunk alone, and then revised and expanded by White in 1959, since when it's been continuously in print. 

I think it's valued far more by US writers than English ones. And even then its most useful point seems to be: get rid of excess in your writing. Refusing to use the passive voice, or chopping out adverbs as though they were never meant to exist, are both nonsense. There's a time and a place for everything and moderation in writing is as sensible as it is in drinking. 

Professor Geoffrey Pullum is one of a number of British writers who criticise the book. On his fascinating blog, The Language Log, her writes that Strunk and White is 'the book that ate America's brain.' And it's worth reading his post on the passive voice a la S&W here for its wit and good (grammatical) sense.