. I must tell you, though, that confidence during the actual writing of this book was a commodity in remarkably short supply. What I was long on was physical pain and self-doubt.

There have been times when for me the act of writing has been a little act of faith, a spit in the eye of despair. The second half of this book was written in that spirit. I gutted it out, as we used to say when we were kids. Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life

There was no miraculous breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over.

You must begin as your own advocate, which means reading the magazines publishing the kind of stuff you write.

Submitting stories without first reading the market is like playing darts in a dark room—you might hit the target every now and then, but you don’t deserve to.

He keeps a careful record of where they have been and what sort of response they got during their visit at each stop.

The very first thing I learned was that you don’t get any kind of hearing at all unless you go in looking like a professional

If some people love your ending and others hate it, same deal—it’s a wash, and tie goes to the writer

You can’t let the whole world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.

If you can’t get out ten per cent of it while retaining the basic story and flavor, you’re not trying very hard. The effect of judicious cutting is immediate and often amazing

The most important things to remember about back story are that (a) everyone has a history and (b) most of it isn’t very interesting. Stick to the parts that are, and don’t get carried away with the rest. Long life stories are best received in bars, and only then an hour or so before closing time, and if you are buying.

I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters

I have never hesitated to ask myself, either before starting the second draft of a book or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I’m writing about

I’ve also written again and again about the fundamental differences between children and adults, and about the healing power of the human imagination.

You undoubtedly have your own thoughts, interests, and concerns, and they have arisen, as mine have, from your experiences and adventures as a human being.

Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story

If you’re a beginner, though, let me urge that you take your story through at least two drafts; the one you do with the study door closed and the one you do with it open.

The great thing about writing with the door shut is that you find yourself forced to concentrate on story to the exclusion of practically everything else

Underneath, however, I’m asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme?

If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience

Someone—I can’t remember who, for the life of me— once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this

your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story.

There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see . . . or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different. They are agents of the status quo. Not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

Some people don’t want to hear the truth, of course, but that’s not your problem. What would be is wanting to be a writer without wanting to shoot straight.

Everything I’ve said about dialogue applies to building characters in fiction. The job boils down to two things: paying attention to how the real people around you behave and then telling the truth about what you see.

It’s also important to remember that no one is “the bad guy” or “the best friend” or “the whore with a heart of gold” in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby

I went back upstairs to catch a few hours’ sleep, thinking of how often we are given information we really could have done without.

Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to.

I can’t remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the people in a story of mine looked like—I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well

I think locale and texture are much more important to the reader’s sense of actually being in the story than any physical description of the players

My own schedule is pretty clear-cut. Mornings belong to whatever is new—the current composition. Afternoons are for naps and letters. Evenings are for reading, family, Red Sox games on TV, and any revisions that just cannot wait. Basically, mornings are my prime writing time.

I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season

The biggest aid to regular (Trollopian?) production is working in a serene atmosphere. It’s difficult for even the most naturally productive writer to work in an environment where alarms and excursions are the rule rather than the exception.

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives.

the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. Thank God. If not for heart and imagination, the world of fiction would be a pretty seedy place. It might not even exist at all.

What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know

—I want you to understand that my basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves.

Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored

Strunk and White offer the best tools (and the best rules) you could hope for, describing them simply and clearly.

Paragraphs are almost as important for how they look as for what they say; they are maps of intent.

The more fiction you read and write, the more you’ll find your paragraphs forming on their own.

frags can also work beautifully to streamline narration, create clear images, and create tension as well as to vary the prose-line

. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story . . . to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

the paragraph, not the sentence, is the basic unit of writing—the place where coherence begins and words stand a chance of becoming more than mere words

No one can be as intellectually slothful as a really smart person; give smart people half a chance and they will ship their oars and drift . . . dozing to Byzantium, you might say.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.

One learns most clearly what not to do by reading bad prose—one novel like Asteroid Miners (or Valley of the Dolls, Flowers in the Attic, and The Bridges of Madison County, to name just a few) is worth a semester at a good writing school, even with the superstar guest lecturers thrown in.

Good writing, on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling

I spent the first twelve years or so of my married life assuring myself that I “just liked to drink.” I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense

telling an alcoholic to control his drinking is like telling a guy suffering the world’s most cataclysmic case of diarrhea to control his shitting.

By 1985 I had added drug addiction to my alcohol problem, yet I continued to function, as a good many substance abusers do, on a marginally competent level. I was terrified not to; by then I had no idea of how to live any other life.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to work anymore if I quit drinking and drugging, but I decided (again, so far as I was able to decide anything in my distraught and depressed state of mind) that I would trade writing for staying married and watching the kids grow up. If it came to that.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

So I read where I can, but I have a favorite place and probably you do, too—a place where the light is good and the vibe is usually strong.

I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones

This business of meaning is a very big deal. If you doubt it, think of all the times you’ve heard someone say “I just can’t describe it” or “That isn’t what I mean.” Think of all the times you’ve said those things yourself, usually in a tone of mild or serious frustration. The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning

You should avoid the passive tense. I’m not the only one who says so; you can find the same advice in The Elements of Style.

You might also notice how much simpler the thought is to understand when it’s broken up into two thoughts. This makes matters easier for the reader, and the reader must always be your main concern;

Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows.

Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

At thirteen 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.

Of all the Poepictures, the one that affected Chris and me the most deeply was The Pit and the Pendulum. Written by Richard Matheson

Dave was a great brother, but too smart for a ten-year-old. His brains were always getting him in trouble, and he learned at some point (probably after I had wiped my ass with poison ivy) that it was usually possible to get Brother Stevie to join him in the point position when trouble was in the wind.

TV came relatively late to the King household, and I’m glad. I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit

In 1960, I sent a story to Spacemen. It was, as well as I can remember, the first story I ever submitted for publication

Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.

By the time I was fourteen (and shaving twice a week whether I needed to or not) the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

“This is good. Not for us, but good. You have talent. Submit again.” Those four brief sentences, scribbled by a fountain pen that left big ragged blotches in its wake, brightened the dismal winter of my sixteenth year.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when you’ve had a little success, magazines are a lot less apt to use that phrase, “Not for us.”

What I cared about most between 1958 and 1966 was movies.

I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.

At the time we’re stuck in it, like hostages locked in a Turkish bath, high school seems the most serious business in the world to just about all of us. It’s not until the second or third class reunion that we start realizing how absurd the whole thing was.

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

We are writers, and we never ask one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language

One notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book.

I don’t believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by selfwill (although I did believe those things once). The equipment comes with the original package

I believe large numbers of people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened

When you’re six, most of your Bingo balls are still floating around in the draw-tank.

“Write one of your own, Stevie,” she said. “Those Combat Casey funnybooks are just junk—he’s always knocking someone’s teeth out. I bet you could do better. Write one of your own

I eventually wrote a story about four magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping out little kids.