Book Review - On Writing by Stephen King

Great Advice for Writers
I was really impressed by the insight into the writing process that Stephen King shares in this book. The book is fairly evenly split into two parts. The first half of the book is mostly autobiographical but very inspiring as you learn from King's own struggle to gain success as a writer and how he paid the bills in the interim.
Before the remainder of the book begins, there is a thirty-page section called "Toolbox" in which King discusses the must-have tools you'll need like grammar, vocabulary, and others. It's here that King begins to relate his hatred for adverbs, something I found very interesting. "Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to be created with the timid writer in mind... With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn't expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting or the picture across."

The second half of the book is where King really gets into the "meat" of good writing skills. He talks about how important it is to read A LOT in order to be a good writer. (An appendix in the back has a listing of all the books King read while working on this one, a very long list.) He talks about the environment that you need when you sit down to write. Then he talks about core writing topics like similes and metaphors, dialogue (good and bad), theme, plot, revising your draft, and more.

I can easily say that I will definitely re-read parts of this book in the future in order to re-familiarize myself with King's insight. By my definition, that is the requirement of a "5 star" book ranking.

"Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe."

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