What I learnt from Stephen King 'On Writing'

Your life experiences shape what you write. Gather more. Reach out, within. Then expand the experience to imagination.





Find your nook; your go to place, for reading and writing. Nothing ostentatious. Nothing distracting. A place which allows your mind to travel to a state of hypnosis.





Reading is a non-negotiable.



 
Write each day, every day.





"It ain't how much you've got, honey, it's how you use it!" Use words that come naturally.

Keep your sentences simple. Put your reader, first.  Be understood.

Back to basics. Go back to your school books on grammar.

Use active voice over passive voice. The meeting will be held at 1900 hrs: Passive. The meeting is at 1900 hrs:Active
The road to hell is paved with adverbs. "You've got a good butt" she said cheekily.
Swifties. They are such fun.


Noun + verb = sentence. Example Dilpreeta writes. - Plums deify!





  “Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”


Ideas and stories are everywhere. There is no method to the madness and there isn't a training that suffices.


Substance abuse DOES NOT make you any more creative than you already are.

Each writer has idiosyncrasies. Find your style.

When browsing a book, check for; style of writing, use of paragraphs, sentence construction, spacing and you will know what you are setting yourself up for.

 What you read is the style of writing you imbibe. You will begin writing what you love to read.

Honesty is indispensable. Don’t write to please.

"If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered."

"Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's"

 Good descriptions begin with clear seeing and end with clear writing. Writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.

Get the description right. Not too long, not too short. Not prescriptive, not ambiguous. It should aid the imagination of the reader in his or her own unique way. 

"Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity"

Dialogues is a skill set best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others-particularly listening, picking -up the accents, dialects, rhythm, and slangs of various groups.

 Every character you create, when writing, is partly you. 

  Best stories are character-driven. They are about people and not events. 

Don’t work with an end in mind, let the characters evolve, the story will flow. Enjoy the journey.

Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.

Research enough to tell a back story not build a manual. Complement facts with imagination.

Share your writing only when it is reasonably reader-friendly

"You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you" 

You can't please all of the readers all of the time; you can't please even some of the readers all of the time, but you really ought to try to please at least some of the readers some of the times. 

Writings are like letters aimed at one person. That one person, is the writer's ideal reader, the one for whom she writes.

Track those rejections. Acceptances will follow.

"Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure"

"Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open"

Learn from all the critiques and comments you get. 

When revising for pacing, just leave out the boring parts

"Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings"

After writing the first draft, let it rest for a while, quite a while, until it feels like reading the work of

someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. It is always easier to kill someone else's darling than it is to kill

your own. Now reduce the second draft by 10%.

...and these weird people are needy!

On Motivation- write because its fulfilling. "The act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair." "Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life."

Finally, the scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.

Birthday's are always special. They bring you treats and treasures. Thank you, Shabani, for "On Writing" and for the note in it.