Stephen King on writing; why he never uses a notebook and other tips from the top!

I method for starting anything as I tell myself the story when I'm laying in bed at night before I go to sleep I'll tell myself this story and so at some point probably nine months after this because this is what it's like you know a little piece of grit and it makes a pearl after a while you just have to give it time and if it doesn't happen it doesn't but a lot of times it does but people 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 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 bread crumbs 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 in my early 20s and just sort of recreated it from memory when I when I wrote the book so the good stuff stays the only thing you can do is you use your best judgment you know and I want to tell stories but I love the language I always have I fell in love with with books with novels when I was a young guy and I fell in love with poetry when I was in college people like Richard Wilbur Hart Crane Ezra Pound TS Eliot all these guys the quality of the language being like something that you could eat with a spoon and I don't aspire to being lyrical I don't want to do that but I want to write as well as I possibly can I don't want to get diarrhea of the mouth I want to keep the story rolling but I want to do it as elegantly as I can i think that readers sort of expect that so and then when the thing is done you give it to people and particularly an editor and one of the things I'm asked sometimes about editing the more successful that you get the more important it is to listen to an editor who won't let you hang yourself in Times Square so I try to do that and I remember what Hemingway said you must kill your darlings well that seems a little bit harsh I not able to kill all my darlings but I do some next anyway I had a Honda because I didn't know any better and and I got it out in the spring when the snow was gone from me and and I started it up and it just it wasn't bright it just wasn't running right and somebody told me well you go on up to this guy's farm he's got a you probably know where this is going he said go on up this guy's got a little garage adjacent to his farm and he's got this unique way of doing things he tells you what it's going to cost and that's what it costs so I went up and about halfway to this farm which was way out in East overshoe the the motor started to skip and by the time I got to the farm it was barely running at all and it died as I pulled into the into the guys door yard that's what we call it May in the dooryard so I'm on my motorcycle and the motorcycle is dead and from this garage came the biggest goddamn Saint Bernard you ever saw in your life and the guy came out the mechanic came out and the dogs going and it's got that stuff coming out of his eyes you know the way that Saint Bernards do and he said don't worry Buster is very friendly and Buster weighed about 250 pounds and so I walked over toward Buster and his haunches just sort of coiled down and his teeth came out and he actually started to go for me and the guy brought a socket wrench down on his hind end and the dog sat still and I thought I might get an apology but the guy looked at me and just said Buster must not alight your face so he fixed my motorcycle and I wrote a book called Cujo and and it worked out and sometimes so sometimes it does it does work out sometimes it works out but it doesn't work out the way you think it's going to work out I wrote a book called the shining and Jesus this is like being led zepplin back together again play all the heads or something that's kind of cool you know you sit in a room and you write stories and everything and then you come out here and people have actually read the stories let's see it's horny that's good so anyway I thought when I wrote The Shining I said I there's a wonderful idea about this family in this haunted hotel and what they really want is the boy with psychic powers and at the end of the book the hotel will kind of absorb him and then we'll see the next year we'll see the whole family as ghosts but it didn't turn out that way 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 I think I think the plot at plot is the last resort of bad writers as a rule I'm a lot more interested in character in situation and you'll follow it where it goes and you know I got a lot of letters after Cujo because the little boy died at the end Ted his name was Ted and he died of heat prostration in the car I got a lot of letters saying how could you kill that little kid parenthetically I got a lot more letters about Greg Stillson kicking a dog to death in the dead zone people care about dogs in a way they don't about kids it's it's weird but there it is hey I don't make the news I just report it you know I'm Sam so anyway I had no idea that tad was going to die and I had no idea that Danny and his mother were going to live but I was really glad when they did you

Channel: The Write Channel with Nicola Monaghan

Views: 1,823,113

Rating: 4.9414649 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen King (Author), Creative Writing (Field Of Study), Writing (Interest), creative writing advice, creative writing inspiration, character, plot, notebooks, ideas, writers process, nicola monaghan, Creative Writing lessons, Creative Writing tips, Creative Writing Lecture, creative writing for beginners, writing advice, writing tips from famous authors, writing tips, how to write a book, the write channel, authortube

Id: lwhOd65gGoY

Length: 7min 40sec (460 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 24 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/WholesomeDM]

I understand where he's coming from, but I have to keep a notebook for two reasons.

1. I forget things constantly. Even the good ideas. I know this, because I'll think "man this idea is so good there's no way I'll forget it." And then the only thing I'll remember will be that thought.

2. My thoughts are often very disorganised, and I need to write things down to give them structure. Otherwise everything I produce would be haphazard and riddled with continuity errors.

[u/BayJorBenHow]

I find that if I don't put something down in words, sometimes it becomes frustrating when it's time to write about it. Maybe my thoughts are too abstract for me, but often if I jot down something quickly I'm able to pin point the part of my idea that matters - rather than having some jumbled picture to work off.

Putting those main points of my idea down, helps me to develop it further in my head. Putting it on paper helps get rid of the unimportant parts, and helps me expand on the parts that matter. Sort of the opposite of how it works for him.

Also, I personally am not a huge fan of Stephan King's writing style. I cannot deny that he is exceptional, but it's just not for me. The more I read about his writing process/advice, the more I wonder if it's to do with the way he creates his story more so than his actual story. I'd be interested to know how other people feel about his works in comparison to how they feel about his writing process. But now I'm rambling on, which is what happens when I free write and don't jot notes down ;)

[u/Erifreis]

I'm a simple man. I see Stephen King, I upvote.

[u/OlanValesco]

Eh, that's what works for him. I personally have gone back over my random ideas (which I wrote down) and been astounded at how good some of the ones I forgot about were. An idea notebook is only a bad idea if you think that you're eternally wed to everything you jot down. But that can happen with ideas that you don't write down either.

Another point is that sometimes just writing it down gives you a different perspective of it. Same with saying it out loud to someone. If your process doesn't involve either of those things, great, but there are lots of people who benefit from them.

[u/Ellwen]

This is definitely something that is going to vary between writers.

I keep a notebook, but I don't use it as a reference guide. There's something about sitting down and writing out an idea by hand that can expose problems in a way that thinking does not.

I tend to be a very visual person, so the ideas in my head often feel strong and it's the paper that threatens them.

[u/AmericanHustle777]

This might work for Stephen King. I am no Stephen King.

[u/JustinBrower]

I recently was reading through some story ideas I wrote months ago, and one in particular was so damn good I couldn't believe I came up with it. I need more of whatever was going through my head that day! :)

Not every piece of advice from successful writers will work for everyone. This is a guessing game. THE guessing game. Pick a strategy and go with it—find out for yourself if it works or not.

[u/doctor_wongburger]

Another "writer" with an even more extreme approach is Jay-Z, who never writes his lyrics for songs down. He composes them entirely in his head then goes into the studio, under the assumption that "If I forget it, it wasn't that good". Also, even if I mostly work the way King does, I do have a Dream Notebook since dreams can be easily forgotten if I don't write about them right away, and I frequently pull from it for imagery in my books.

[u/ladyAnder]

The good idea's stay do stay. While keeping a notebook for many writers is helpful and I do advise it just because writers don't all think alike. However, I never write down the random ideas that may pop up in my head. I don't like wasting my time with something I know I'm not going to write.

If I truly like an idea, I'm going to stick with it. I adopted a 2 week roll around for story ideas in my head so I'll write on the things I want. If the idea survives, I've a winner, if I abandon it within two days, forget it, then it wasn't interesting enough to me to write. Novel writing is a time commitment and I want to work on the story ideas I know I will finish.