Bad Writing Advice from Stephen King's ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT

back in the year 2000 Stephen King published his book on writing A Memoir of The Craft since then it's become the go-to book for new writers it's hard to find a list of books for writers that doesn't include this one and if you look at the best books for writers on good reads this one is number one the only problem is it's packed full of bad unhelpful advice for new and amateur writers in this video I'm going to walk you through the bad advice in the book why it's wrong and what you can actually do to level up your craft as a writer my name is Tim Gro I'm the CEO of story grid where we help you build the skills write a book and leave your legacy my partner Sean coin is the Creator and founder of story grid and he is a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience let me tell you something about Steve King Steve King wishes he could write like me so first off I'm a big fan of Stephen King I love his writing my favorite novel of all time is 112263 I love his writing in Green Mile gwendy's button box joy land Needful Things and many other books I even love on writing and what I love about Stephen King is he loves writing he loves the storytelling the AC of writing everything that goes into it the only problem is it's not very helpful to new writers the thing is that Stephen King submitted his first short story for publication to a magazine called Spaceman way back in 1960 he was 12 years old fast forward 14 years it's 1974 and he publishes his first book Carrie which went on to be a huge bestseller and he was 26 years old by the year 2000 when on writing came out he was 53 years old and had been writing for over 40 years and all of this extensive knowledge and experience as a writer leads to three problems with this book the first problem is he's forgotten what it's like to be a beginner the last time he was a newbie writer he was a tween like imagine that first of all just try to think back to when you were a tween and anything you were doing at that point and then think about something that you've been doing for over 40 years it's almost impossible to put yourself back in the shoes of a beginner which leads us to the problem number two the advice given in this book is from someone that knows how to consistently write well so much advice in the book is tied to this idea that he can write consistently well and so his first drafts are pretty good he doesn't require a ton of editing because he's an expert that's been doing this and that is not the position new and amateur writers find themselves in problem number three is that almost everything he does in writing is intuitive what you find when you work with professional writers is that most of them do it very intuitively and they don't really understand how they do it however if you ask them how they write they will talk for a long time they just won't sayu stuff that will actually help you become a better writer there is a huge gap between being really good at something and being able to teach something this is why Tiger Woods even at the height of his golf career still had a golf coach because being able to do something is different than being able to teach it so now let's just break down the bad advice and I'm just going to start with the just straight up condescending bits of this book about halfway through the book he pauses to give his thesis and part of that thesis is this while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one it is possible with lots of hard work dedication and timely help to make a good writer out of a merely competent one so this just isn't true like I know this in my own life I was a horribly bad writer I became a competent writer and now I'm a pretty good writer we're going to lay great writer off to the side cuz it's even hard to wrap our heads around what that is but this idea that you can't be a bad writer and then become a competent and then good writer is just nuts like again if I went back to when he was 10 years old and trying to write I'm sure his first writing was bad writing and yet he's forgotten what that's like and we see this all the time as story grid is we can take somebody that's just a legitimately bad writer if they learn the basic skills they can become a competent and good writer let's look at the next one this is where he addresses this idea of talent he says that Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless now I get what he's saying in the context of this passage what he's saying is writing shouldn't feel like work you should look forward to it you should be excited to sit down and write and if it feels like work then you don't have the talent you should basically give up and again I just don't think this is true most of us that are coming to writing when we're later in life the problem is that we've wanted to do it a long time and now we're actually trying to sit down and do it and just because it takes some work to get us in that chair and typing the words doesn't mean we don't have this magical thing called Talent what we do have is responsibilities and jobs in decades of voices in our head from family members saying we're wasting our time we have all of those things that we're trying to work past so when I read this I feel like it can just be really demoralizing if you're a new writer just trying to get in the seat and start writing and you read this and you think well maybe I just don't have the talent and that isn't necessarily true honey come on over here suar [Music] buns next up let's look at this advice around read a lot and write a lot he has lots of passages on this one if you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others read a lot and write a lot there's no way around these two things that I'm aware of no shortcut can I be blunt on this subject if you don't have time to read you you don't have the time or the tools to write simple as that I like to get 10 pages a day which amounts to 2,000 words that's 180,000 words over a 3mon span a goodish length for a book something in which the reader can happily get lost I suggest a th000 words a day and because I'm feeling magnimous I'll also suggest that you can take one day a week off at least to begin with you learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself now I have a whole video dedic at to this advice of read a lot and write a lot and why it isn't true and it doesn't work and it is full of this idea of survivorship bias but I'm just going to stop here and say this idea that the only way that you can learn writing is to just churn out a thousand words a day and then read a lot of books is again kind of nuts first of all there's lots of people that read a lot and they can't write there's lots of people that write a lot and they also are writing bad this is what we teach all the time at story grid that there are basic skills that you can learn as a writer and actually focusing on those and working on those is a shortcut you still have to learn them it's still hard work but it's not random this idea that you just read a lot and then churn out a thousand words a day and write these really long manuscripts where none of it works and you just kind of hope one day it'll work that's not how writing and learning how to write should work it should be a systematic process of learning skills so if you want to hear more about this go down the description I have a link to my video talking about this myth of read a lot and write a lot about a third of the way through the book Stephen King introduces this idea of a toolbox I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you then instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work this part I can get on board with the idea that you have a toolbox and then you're going to put tools in there and build up the skills to use those tools is exactly what we teach at story grid but when we talk about what these skills are this is where I split ways from Stephen King and what he writes in on writing because he spends a lot of time talking about things that aren't that important and then on the things that are important he gives really vague and unhelpful advice so first let's look at the thing that most of us have heard about this idea of adverb his basic idea is avoid them at all costs so at one point he says the adverb is not your friend and then he says I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs but then if you back up about a 80 pages from when he wrote that he has this cence they were boringly wholesome and I don't know about you but that's kind of a weird adverb I actually thought he put it in there tongue and cheek but it was so far before his opinions on adverbs that well I think he meant to put it there now the real problem problem comes when you read these writers books is they use adverbs and so this idea that so many authors including Stephen King talks about how evil adverbs are and how you shouldn't use adverbs and then you read their writing and you're like there's an adverb there's another adverb there's an adverb so how do you know when to use adverbs and when not to use adverbs because they just kind of say this blanket be careful and don't use that many but they don't really tell you how to know well thankfully we actually know how to use adverbs here at story grid and there's a really simple rule and it takes a minute to explain it so I've already done a video on it so that's down in the description as well that one's called how to unborn your writing and it's just a really simple idea about when you should use adverbs and when you shouldn't and once you do that you'll understand and this is one of those first moments in the book where the advice is just so vague it's not really helpful when you read it it feels like ooh I'm learning something and then when you go to put it into practice it's not actually helpful so let's look at the next one so the next one he starts talking about paragraph length he says infiction the paragraph is less structured it's the beat instead of the actual Melody but then when you keep reading and you try to see what his advice is it's something around read books that are like yours and then try to make the paragraphs about the same amount of length but again it's so vague as to be unhelpful then we move on to dialogue and this is what he has to say about it as with all the other aspects of fiction the key to writing good dialogue is honesty and if you are honest about the words coming out of your character's mouths you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism again this is where I want to tie back to this idea that he's been doing this for 40 years at this point and when he has characters they're so clear in his mind and they are locked in so clearly he really does feel like he's just listening to what they say and writing it down un un fortunately for new and amateur writers it doesn't work that way cuz I've actually read the writing where people just kind of say what they think the character is saying and it's not very good there are some specific things that you can learn that will make your dialogue better the first is objects of Desire being really really clear on what your characters want understanding essential tactics which is how your characters go about getting the things that they want and making sure that there's plenty of tension and conflict in your scenes with competing objects of Desire now again I've addressed this in another video but the idea here is that every character in every scene should have differing and conflicting objects of Desire this is what drives the conflict and once you have that conflict in place knowing what your character should stay and when becomes a lot easier but it is not just as simple as like telling the truth whatever that really is when it comes to fiction if you want to use that kind of language language take it out in the street for me I think the most frustrating part of this book is when he started talking about theme so I've got a couple longer passages I want to share here and they kind of get this point across of why it was so frustrating for me I have never hesitated to ask myself either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft just what it is I'm riding about why I'm spending the time when I could be playing my guitar or riding my motorcycle what got my nose down to the grindstone in the first place and then kept it there and then just a little bit later he says this I should close this little sermonette with a word of warning starting with the questions and thematic concerns as a recipe for bad fiction good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme and almost never begins with theme and progresses to Story the only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell's animal farm and I have a sneaking suspicion that with animal farm the story idea may indeed have come first if I see Orwell in the afterlife I mean to ask him but once your basic stories on paper you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions to do less is to Rob your work and eventually your readers of the vision that makes each tell you right uniquely your own so first of all he's just factually wrong about George Orwell George Orwell talks about in his essay why I write that he always always comes up with an idea first something he wants to see change in the world and then that's what drives his writing so Orwell did with his writing pick the theme first and then write the story based on that theme and so what's weird to me is that this is the tool that King goes to when he gets stuck with his writing so whether he's halfway through a for draft or he's now going onto the second draft he pulls this idea of theme out and he uses that to find his way through his story so so the idea that you want to consider this before you write is a little weird to me to have an idea of what you're trying to say with your book before you try to write it seems like a good idea to me now I see what he's saying if you try to just Jam your theme down the reader throat that's not going to work but that doesn't work no matter when you use your theme so at story grid we are really adamant of getting clear about why you're writing the book the kind of transformation you want to make in the reader and having that in mind before you write the first word of your book and it makes so many things easier it gives you a direction and you end up not Meandering off and wandering in the woods while you're trying to write this book he obviously thinks theme is a good idea and I just don't understand why he wouldn't recommend that you keep this in mind from the very beginning and at this point we get to the idea of plot and this is the one he denigrates the most he says plot is I think the good writer's Last Resort and the dollard's first choice the story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored and then he goes on to say his whole advice in coming up with his stories is he just comes up with a cool what if scenario and then he just starts writing and again this is where his 40 years of experience just comes shining through is that he is plotting the problem is he does it so intuitively he doesn't understand that's what he's doing if you read his really great books they all Arc in the same sort of way the idea that you couldn't plan that out ahead of time and especially if you're a new or amateur writer you shouldn't plan it out ahead of time is absolutely crazy I'm sure your drawer is just as full of mine of books that we just sat down and we started writing and we had a cool idea and then they just kind of meander off into nowhere that's what I don't want to happen to you and if you structure your story ahead of time the right way it gives you a road map so you don't wander off in the wilderness while you're trying to write so this idea that only bad writers would plot their book ahead of time first of all is nuts because there's plenty of great writers that plot their book ahead of time but it is not the dollard's choice it's actually a good recommended way to plan out your book ahead of time so you actually have an idea of what you're writing this is what I need so from there he also spends some time talking about vocabulary which he basically says use what you've got grammar which is just learn it and make sure that you have good grammar in your books which makes sense he talks about using active voice instead of passive voice some pretty common things and I agree with those use what you got don't worry too much about vocabulary yeah you should know basic English or whatever language you're trying to write in grammar and of course you want to use the active voice most of the time instead of passive voice so let's look at the tools that Stephen King says should be in your toolbox he talks about adverbs but you're not supposed to use those apparently so those don't go in there he talked about paragraph length but he didn't really get specific about it but I guess that's in there he says dialogue but that's just telling the truth theme but you're not really supposed to use it until much later in your book and plot is a horrible idea and so we shouldn't be using plot you should have good vocabulary good grammar and use active voice instead of passive voice now look at this list is this really going to make you a better writer doing these things like maybe you'll clean up your paragraph a little maybe your dialogue will get slightly better but is that truly what's wrong with your books and with your writing in fact he boils down his whole book at one point by saying this we've covered some basic aspects of good storytelling all of which return to the same core ideas that practice is invaluable and should feel good really not like practice at all and that honesty is indispensable skills in description dialogue and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal Clarity and without using a lot of tiresome unnecessary adverbs now I just want to highlight this this line right here it all boils down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear if you've read this book you've tried this and it doesn't work and so then what do you do because all of his advice is encapsulated in this one sentence and so I'm going to come back to this point over and over he's been writing for over 40 years so for him it really is just seeing clearly and writing down what he sees but that's not really helpful for new and amateur writers at this point when he published this book on writing he had been a published author for over 20 years so his advice is vague and unhelpful because he does things so intuitively that he doesn't really understand how he does them so I like this whole metaphor of a toolbox and having Tools in there and the skills to use them but when you try to follow his advice on the tools and building the skills to use them it's so vague to be unhelpful so the last bit of bad advice I want to touch on is what he says to do once you have a finished manuscript so you've written a manuscript it's done now what do you do so basically after letting it sit for a while he says you need to sit down and read it and he says do it all in one sitting if that's possible it won't be of course if your book is a four or 500 pager make all the notes you want but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies there'll be plenty only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says oh well let it go that's what copy editors are for during that reading the top part of my mind is concentrating on story and toolbox concerns knocking out pronouns with unclear inance I hate and mistrust pronouns every one of them as slippery as a Fly by Night personal injury lawyer adding clarifying phrases where they seem necessary and of course deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with never all of them never enough so what do we see him focusing on here on his first read of his first draft as a book he's fixing misspellings he's fixing pronouns he's redoing sentences he's fixing small inconsistencies what does this say about him as a writer that his first draft works that he's a pro that when he sits down and he writes a first draft it probably mostly works now you can argue with this with certain of his books but over the career he writes great books and so he writes the first draft and it mostly works but for new and amateur writers your draft is not going to work it's going to have huge major macro problems and the idea that you should sit down and fix Senate structure and misspellings instead of look at the macro structure of your story and find the problem s is a recipe for Insanity because I have done that that's what I would do I'd get my first draft I'd say Stephen King would let it sit in a drawer for a little bit so I'd let it sit in the drawer for a little bit then I'd pull it out I'd read the whole thing I'd fix misspelling I'd fix pronouns I'd show it to an editor and they would tell me that the book didn't work so I just wasted all of that time and effort fixing misspellings it's like that old adage of shining the brass and the Titanic as it's going down and so then he goes on to say he basically writes a draft writes another draft and gives it a Polish after the drafts he gives it to five or six friends which gives him some feedback that he may or may not incorporate depending on what he wants to do and then it's done and it's off to the publisher and if this is you if this is you congratulations you're a great writer you can write a great first draft after one or two drafts it's ready for a Polish and send it off to the editor but that's not where new and amateur writers finds elves and he's not even clear on what each draft is for the way that we do things at story grid is you write one draft then you use the story grid tools to find where the problems are in the draft and you start with the big macro problems first then you go back and you write a second draft specifically fixing those specific problems then you do another route of edits where you're looking for specific problems with specific ways to fix them until you get all the way down to those little nitpicky things but you shouldn't fix your sentences if you have major story problems because it becomes just a waste of time buddy buddy I ain't taking the wrap on this I lock this place up every night it's not my fault if every pervert weirdo go talk to someone in charge so I've spent all this time denigrating this book so let's talk about what did the book get right did it get anything right is it worth reading at all Stephen King is just a great writer so hearing him tell about his origin story how he became a writer talking about how much he loves writing and he interlaces in the whole book little quips and stories from his own experience it's just fun to read because he's a great writer and like I said get the Audi book because hearing him talk about writing is just a joy I also want to go back all the way to the very beginning of the book there's actually three little forwards at the beginning of the book and the first one I want to reference is in the second forward and he said this fiction writers present company included don't understand very much about what they do not why it works when it's good not why it doesn't when it's bad okay so this is right on the money and I kind of cracked me up when I went back and I saw this when I was reading through the book and then I put it in my notes that he told us right at the beginning of the book that he didn't know what the he was doing and so I just love that that he told you UPF front you probably shouldn't listen to him but then he went on and wrote 300 pages about how to write that weren't very helpful now I don't think this is true I do think that you can actually learn specific skills and you can know when you're doing it right and doing it wrong this is completely what we've dedicated ourselves to his story grid but I do love this idea that he put it right in the beginning that he doesn't really know what he's talking about in the next one in the third forward he also says this one rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book is the editor is always right so story grid was created by Sean coin my partner over 30 years of editing experience looking at stories understanding them and having a really Stellar track record and helping take books that were somewhat working and turning them into working books and then we've developed an entire narrative Theory here at story grid that we teach you from the ground up all based on his editing and writing experience so I can get on board with this one that the editor is always right so what else did he get right in this book first of all he talked about critique groups being super unhelpful he said how valuable are the critiques not very in my experience sorry A lot of them are maddingly vague I love the feeling of Peter's story someone may say it had something a sense of I don't know there's a loving kind of you know I can't exactly describe it again this is what we do at story grid is get away from this vague unhelpful feedback and be able to give specific feedback so I agree with this kind of random critique groups with other writers are very helpful the other thing he talks about is having your ideal reader in mind now for him it was his wife and he gets a little clunky because is he thinking about who's going to read the book in the marketplace or is he writing it for one specific person and we call this in story grid Sam the single audience member this is part of our narrative device again there's a link down in the description but I did really like this part because he talks about writing the book for one person and having that person in mind when you're writing that book and we think that is really important in story grid okay so what to do with this book what do what do we do with this book on writing again I've read it many times I went back read it two more times put a bunch of Post-its in it just for this video um if you want a well-written backstory of a great writer and what it took for him to become great it's a fun read if you're a new or amateur writer looking for specific advice on how to level up your writing this is not the book for you don't read it for that you're not going to get that and if you try to get that out of it you're going to end up frustrated and wasting your time now there are lots of ways to actually level up your writing I've talked about some of those in this video but this is what we do here on the story grid Channel and at the story grid website so make sure you like this video subscribe to this Channel and hit the Bell so that you get all of the future videos re-released go to story grid.com sign up for the newsletter check out the other other resources that way you can get the most out of what we're doing at story grid but as always thanks for being a part of our community thanks for being a writer and I'll see you next time and now may the Lord bless you and keep you may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and comfort you and lift you up and give you peace amen as a postcript to this video I do want to share my favorite line in the entire book so Stephen King is talking about the genre you might write in and you'll probably end up writing the things you love to read and I think that's fantastic and Stephen King has also taken a lot of criticism over the years about his horror writing and all this stuff in his books and then he had this line I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin that's all if you disapprove I can only shrug my shoulders it's what I have when it comes to our writing a lot of times we feel this pressure on what we should be writing maybe we feel from the writer groups that we're in where we should be writing something more sophisticated or literary or maybe we have the voices of our family or religion in our head saying oh no you can't use those four-letter words or oh you can't write about sex but yet that's you know that's what you want to write about and I just love this line because it reminds me that what I want to write about what I want to bring to the page is good enough and that's okay and so this line I just love this line because again Stephen King loves writing he knows who he is a writer and he's written some truly truly Masterpiece fiction that I have loved and so I appreciate that he did his best to share what he knew with us uh in this book um kind of missed the mark on actually helpful advice but we did get to hear about his background of a writer and this line meant a lot to me because it means hey whatever you want to write about that's good enough all right so I'm going to end there I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time

Channel: Story Grid

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Id: nOEF4lV70j4

Length: 28min 53sec (1733 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023