10 Writing Tips from Stephen King for Screenwriters and Writers

you go where the story leads you and in this case it had i didn't had no idea it was going to have a dark conclusion my idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around i think the the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration and around the time that i turned 17 or 18 the nail fell out of the wall because there were so many rejection slips on it so i got a bigger nail i just look for ideas that i really enjoy something that i really want to live with for a while i like the story about the people under the dome [Music] my brother and i were both readers and at some point along the way i decided that i wanted to be a writer so i started to type up stories on an old typewriter that i had and uh and i started to send them to magazines and i pounded a a nail into the wall and i'd get the rejection slips back and i would put them on that nail and around the time that i turned 17 or 18 the nail fell out of the wall because there were so many rejection slips on it so i got a bigger nail and if there's any any secret that i know to success it's uh if you don't succeed get a bigger nail yes yes there is something i want to ask you all right how the do you write so many books so fast i think oh i've had a really good six months i've written three chapters and you've you've finished three books in that time here's the thing okay there are there are books and there are books um the way that that the way that i work uh i try to get out there and i try to get six pages a day so with a book like end of watch and i work when i'm working i work every day uh three four hours and i try to get those six pages and i try to get them fairly clean so if the manuscript is let's say 360 pages long that's basically two months work it's concentrated but it's a fairly but that's assuming that it goes well and you do hit six pages a day i usually do you don't ever have a day where you sit down there and it's like constipation and you write a sentence and you hate the sentence and okay you you check your email and you wonder if you had any talent after all and maybe you should have been a plumber don't you have days like that no i mean there's real life you know i can be working away and uh something comes up and you have to basically get up and you have to go to see the doctor or you have to take somebody care package or you have to go to the post office because whatever but mostly i try to get the six pages in although entropy tries to intervene you go where the story leads you and in this case it had i didn't had no idea it was going to have a dark conclusion you know you were mentioning before we got going salem's lot and uh when i started that story i thought to myself well this will be the opposite of dracula where the good guys win and this in this book the good guys are going to lose and everybody's going to become a vampire at the end of the book and that didn't happen because you go where the book leads you and this one just led me into a very dark place i didn't even want to go there i want people to find it out for themselves but in any case john irving when he was talking to a bunch of would-be writers one time said that the first thing he does with a book is right the last line of that book and i heard that and i just went you know like that because to me that's kind of like spoiling the fun i like to start with a little bit of an idea you know they come from different places sometimes they stick around and you want to do something sometimes they don't but the idea is to start with something and just start to go with it you know and uh that's the joy of finding things out of having characters that just sort of walk on and become a big part of the story i i feel like you have to follow the characters and you have to follow the story where it leads and the last thing that i want to do is to spoil a book with plot so you know i think i think the plot that plot is the last resort of bad writers is a rule i'm a lot more interested in character and situation and you'll follow it where it goes and so anyway i had no idea that tad was gonna die and i had no idea that uh danny and his mother were gonna live but i was really glad when they did people will say do you keep a notebook and the answer is i think a writer's notebook is the best way in the world to immortalize bad ideas uh my idea about a good idea is one that sticks around and sticks around and sticks around it's like to me it's like if you were to put breadcrumbs in a strainer and shake it which is what the passage of time is for me it's like shaking a strainer all this stuff that's not very big and not very important just kind of dissolves and falls out but the good stuff stays you know the big pieces stay i had the idea for under the dome when i was teaching high school back in 1973 and it was just too big for me and i was too young for it and i wrote about 25 26 pages and put it away there's a scene at the beginning of this book where this woodchuck gets cut in half when this dome comes down over this town i had written that part when i was in uh in my early 20s and just sort of recreated it from memory when i when i wrote the book so the good stuff stays so does that does that mean that writing can be um taught can be learned it can be learned but i'm not sure it can be taught it's a self-taught kind of thing i think the the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books and you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out uh i mean as a teenager i read a lot of h.b lovecraft so i wrote like hp lovecraft and in my 20s i read a lot of ross mcdonald and raymond chandler so i wrote like those guys but little my little you develop your own style i have a routine because i think that writing is self-hypnosis and you fall into a uh a kind of a trance if you do the same passes over and over so i'll get up uh have some breakfast with my wife uh watch cnn and then i'll make my pot of tea and sit down and write for about three and a half hours i started with short stories when i was 18 sold my first one when i was about 20 and produced pretty much nothing but well i wrote a couple of novels but they were not accepted and a lot of them were so bad that i didn't even bother to revise them but the short stories were making money and i got very comfortable with that format and i've never wanted to leave it completely behind you hear some people who write who write short stories talk about the fact that in their mind you're they're they have these massive novels written about these characters but really what you see on the page is just a sliver of a story that's in their brain that they could tell they could write a novel about it in most cases yeah what what it is true and what happens to me a lot of times is i will start out saying this would be a terrific short story idea and it balloons and becomes a novel misery started as a short story and gerald's game started as a short story those were things that i thought would be small and grew to a size where they would be a novel for a long time i felt like movies were a lesser medium because it's like skating it's all on the surface every now and then some movie will be reduced to doing a voiceover you know where this character is talking and i could just kind of get the interior life yeah and i just kind of go no no no you've clearly mistaken this medium for something that it's not but i came to realize that films have a language of their own and you have to learn that language and it isn't enough to say well i've watched movies my whole life you have to write a couple i started i think i was probably i'd been writing novels full time for about a year and a half and i thought to myself i want to learn how to write movies i want to try it anyway so i got a book that was about writing screenplays and i read it but at the end it had a sample screenplay from the twilight zone that showed me what the form was and that was something real that i could that i could so i took the ray bradbury book something wicked this way comes and i wrote a screenplay and i learned what i was doing it wasn't for anybody but me and then a little while later i wrote a book called the shining and it was my third book and i got contractual rights to write the first draft screenplay for that and i did do that and i found out later that stanley kubrick who had got the rights through warner brothers had already determined that he and a lady named diane johnson were going to do the screenplay for the shining so they basically my screenplay went in and they said no this won't do and then they went on to what they really wanted to do which was fine i wasn't angry or upset you're not after a while you get thousands of rejection slips before you break through you kind of get used to that and it's just part of the game but the thing is you learn you learn little by little so release books differently now than used to in that like do you have a different definition of what a successful book is or where on the eve of a book's release do you pay a special kind of attention to how it will be received or how it's being reviewed i think that if you spend too much time worrying about what the audience is going to like that they're not going to like anything that you do i just look for ideas that i really enjoy something that i really want to live with for a while i like the story about the people under the dome and i get into it most of the time and then i just have a ball i never finished a book and felt like i'm glad that's done i usually finish a book and say geez i don't want to say goodbye to these people and if the people who read it feel the same way then then i'm really happy look you know a lot of these interviews the question that uh that's the worst is people will say where do you get your ideas i don't know where i get them you know and if i did man would i tell you i mean jesus they've been good to me all i know is that i sit down and i turn on the machine and there's always that first 10 minutes that's like smelling a dead fish or walking into a monkey house and then something will click a little tiny bit and that leads to something else and it's like until it's going faster and faster and then you hit this kind of uh escape velocity you're gone the world the normal mundane sort of stupid world where you got to do the breakfast dishes and you got to make the beds you know and you got to worry about getting the kid to the dentist all that's gone but there's a place where you have to walk away from it because it's so kind of addictive that otherwise you might just sit there and skip meals and just being lost in that world and you wouldn't want to do that because that's sort of the way crazy people are institutions you know what i'm saying [Music] you

Channel: Outstanding Screenplays

Views: 420,780

Rating: 4.9647007 out of 5

Keywords: video essay, screenwriting, screenwriter, analysis, screenplay, scriptwriting, screenplays, screenplay tips, writing, script, tips, review, filmmaking, motivational video, tips from screenwriters, directors chair, stephen king interviews, novel advice, how to write a novel, how to write a book, it chapter 2, pet cemetery, carrie, the shining, writing horror, under the dome, the shawshank redemption, the green mile, doctor sleep, castle rock, cujo, salems lot, firestarter, writer

Id: B6SKj_eiY9k

Length: 12min 51sec (771 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/carrie-satan]

1. Cocaine 2.repeat 9 times

[u/Shotgun_Mosquito]

Um... Why are writing tips in video format? I want to read to write.

/rantoff

[u/0and18]

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