Stephen King (1947) is a renowned American author celebrated as the ‘King of Horror’ for his iconic contributions to the genre. He has also explored other genres, among them suspense, crime, science-fiction, fantasy and mystery. King has published 65 novels/novellas, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, five non-fiction books, and approximately 200 short stories.

Now, a writer with such a huge body of work can surely give some advice to those of us who are attempting to write fiction or have that ambition. I myself have been considering it for a long time, and I still have that crazy dream of one day writing a masterpiece. But I don’t think I can. I am a web editor and that is a completely different game than writing fiction.

Nevertheless, if I do want to make an attempt to write any kind of fiction in the future, the book ‘Stephen King on Writing’ – a lovely gift from my wife Loesje – is my must-read guide. It gave me much clarity on how to approach the process if I ever want to have a serious go at it. Below are ten tips for aspiring writers, who are serious about completing a work of fiction that will actually please their readers.

01) Start with story
Starting your novel with thematic concerns (like I always do ;-)) is a bad idea, believes King. Good fiction always begins with story and then progresses to theme. Another important belief of King is that stories are found things, like fossils. Stories pretty much make themselves. It is the job of the writer to give them a place to grow (and to transcribe them of course). Use your whole writer’s toolbox as well as you can to get as much of the fossil out of the ground in the best possible state.

02) Read, read, read
To become a good writer, there is really no way around this one. You must read vigorously. King: ‘We read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work.’ Good writing, on the other hand, teached the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters and truth-telling. Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. ‘Do it because you enjoy it.’

03) Practice, practice, practice
Same thing as reading, you must write a lot to succeed. ‘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 those two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.’ So there you have it.

04) Work on your book every day
One of the things that makes writing novels so different from writing articles or essays or even making magazines, is that you have to approach it like a day job. Except it shouldn’t feel like a job. King cranks out a novel in three months’ time, and he does that by showing up every day in his room and spending hours there behind his writing desk. I erroneously thought I could write my great novel in bars, cars, toilets, trains, in-between moments, et cetera, but that’s not possible. I have been able to do that with my essays on Free-Consciousness, but with a novel it simply won’t work.

To succeed, you must work on your book every day, writes Stephen King: ‘Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to. If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people. The tale’s narrative cutting edge starts to rust and I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace. Worst of all, the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade. The work starts to feel like work.’

05) Keep the reader on your mind
Again, focussing on story is one of the most important tasks as a writer. If you want to achieve satisfying an audience with your book, that is. ‘Book buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and then will keep them turning the pages. Your reader must always be your main concern: without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quicking in the void.’

06) Focus on paragraphs
King argues that 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. It is a marvelous and flexible instrument that can be a single word long or run on for pages. You must learn to use it well if you are to write well. In fiction, the paragraph is less structured – it’s the beat instead of the actual melody. The more fiction you read and write, the more you’ll find your paragraphs forming on their own. And that’s what you want. When composing it’s best not to think too much about where paragraphs begin and end, the trick is to let nature take its course.

07) Avoid the passive tense and don’t use dialogue attribution
‘Stephen King on Writing’ also contains some style tips of which these two are especially important. First of all, avoid the passive tense. Don’t write: The meeting will be held at seven o’clock. Write instead: The meeting’s at seven. Don’t write: The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the sofa. Write instead: Freddie and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Another tool that is often misused is dialogue attribution. Don’t do it, says King.

‘Put it down’, she shouted menacingly.
‘Give it back’, he pleaded abjectly, ‘it’s mine.’
‘Don’t be such a fool, Jekyll’, Utterson said contemptuously.

Just resist the temptation and write he said, she said.

08) Use descriptive writing in the right way
A description, according to the master, begins with a visualisation of what it is. ‘You want your reader to experience. It ends with translating what you see in your mind into words on the page.’ Don’t underdo it and don’t overdo it: ‘Thin description leaves your reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium.’

09) Make good use of rewriting
His first editor – John Gould – gave young Stephen a tip on a sports article he wrote: ‘When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking things out that are not the story.’ When rewriting your first draft, it should be possible to take out 10 percent.

Gould added something else that was interesting. ‘Write with your door closed, rewrite with you door open.’ Your stuff starts out being just for you. But once you know what the story is and get it right, it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. ‘Or criticize it.’

When you have completed the first draft of your book, leave it alone for at least six weeks, King advises. Because then you have some more distance between your work and your authorship, you can more easily delete or rewrite passages. Then hand out the books to about eight proofreaders and let them criticize it.

10) Keep on going
A lesson King learned from almost abandoning his breakthrough novel ‘Carrie’ – which enabled him to pursue a career as a full-time novelist – is that ‘stepping away from a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes, you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.’

Conclusion
Taking all this in, I wondered if this is really the thing for me. Besides the practical advice, King’s book is also like a confrontational eye-opener for dreamers like me. Is this really the sort of thing that I want to do and that I am able to do? The sort of strenuous reading and writing program King advocates – four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an appetite for them.

So that will be the litmus test for me if I ever want to attempt (again) to write a novel: will I really enjoy going through this process? If not, then just fuhgeddaboudit.

Read also: How to Write a Television Series