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.
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
H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness,
Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity,
Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains
why 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.
