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On Writing

By Stephen King

(213)

| Hardcover | 9780340769966

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Book Description

Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."

King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo

Critics

On writing

"On writing" afferma King "è il romanzo della mia vita, non perché la mia vita sia un romanzo, ma perché la mia vita è scrivere." Il libro è un manuale tecnico per aspiranti scrittori, pieno di esempi e riferimenti pratici, arricchito dalla vita prof ... (read full critics)

librerie published on Thu, 2 Dec 2010

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft By Stephen King

Ladies and gentleman, a man who needs no introduction for once this overused line is true. Practically everybody knows who Stephen King is, so we'll skip the biographical stuff. Do you want to write popular fiction? Then you need to read On Writing: ... (read full critics)

bookpage published on Thu, 16 Sep 2010

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11 Reviews

4 people find this helpful

Semi-biographical, so that was interesting, but this is actually one of the better writing reference books I've ever read.

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dalai lala said on Dec 30, 2007 | Add your feedback

3 people find this helpful

ironiclly this is officially my first Stephen King book, all I can say is that he really is born to be a writer, regardless the obstacle of early hardship, life-threathening accident, alcho-addit...and no matter how prepared I was, still impressed his down-to-earth, and the bravery that to be able t ... (continue)

ironiclly this is officially my first Stephen King book, all I can say is that he really is born to be a writer, regardless the obstacle of early hardship, life-threathening accident, alcho-addit...and no matter how prepared I was, still impressed his down-to-earth, and the bravery that to be able to share his 'secret' of the craft--risky. The reason I didn't read much of his fiction is that I believe what I read, and I know he's very good, so the horror might haunt there for a long while, as I long as I could control my desire to read, I won't.

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ymm said on Sep 15, 2007 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

1 person find this helpful

I found this extremely helpful and cleverly written in a way that he doesn't seem to impose his ideas on people, more just 'suggests'. By being almost biographical it gave me an incite to how he finds his inspiration and how it's never as easy as it seems.

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Valentine said on Oct 12, 2009 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

S.King ci spiega come e perchè si scrive. Lo fa in maniera semplice e diretta al contrario di tanti esperti nostrani...e ricordatevi di chiudere la porta!

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Giancarlo Bernardi said on Jan 25, 2012 about the Audio Cassette edition | Add your feedback

Interesting Read

This was an interesting read as it was part memoir/part technical regarding writing. I didn't really know much about King's personal life prior to reading this, but I enjoyed it.

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Marsha said on Aug 7, 2010 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback

A visit into Stephen King's mind, mostly but not only focused on his perception of himself as a writer.
Do not expect a manual about how to write a best-seller, although King does impart some lessons: this is "just" a very good, thinly disguised autobiography of a very successful writer.

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Marco Piva said on Feb 9, 2010 about the Mass Market Paperback edition | Add your feedback