On Writing

by Stephen King

  Not much, though; research is back story, and the key word in back story is back. The tale I have to tell in Buick Eight has to do with monsters and secrets. It is not a story about police procedure in western Pennsylvania. What I’m looking for is nothing but a touch of verisimilitude, like the handful of spices you chuck into a good spaghetti sauce to really finish her off. That sense of reality is important in any work of fiction, but I think it is particularly important in a story dealing with the abnormal or paranormal. Also, enough details—always assuming they are the correct ones—can stem the tide of letters from picky-ass readers who apparently live to tell writers that they messed up (the tone of these letters is unvaryingly gleeful). When you step away from the “write what you know” rule, research becomes inevitable, and it can add a lot to your story. Just don’t end up with the tail wagging the dog; remember that you are writing a novel, not a research paper. The story always comes first. I think that even James Michener and Arthur Hailey would have agreed with that.

  – 14 –

  I’m often asked if I think the beginning writer of fiction can benefit from writing classes or seminars. The people who ask are, all too often, looking for a magic bullet or a secret ingredient or possibly Dumbo’s magic feather, none of which can be found in classrooms or at writing retreats, no matter how enticing the brochures may be. As for myself, I’m doubtful about writing classes, but not entirely against them.

  In T. Coraghessan Boyle’s wonderful tragicomic novel East Is East, there is a description of a writer’s colony in the woods that struck me as fairy-tale perfect. Each attendee has his or her own little cabin where he or she supposedly spends the day writing. At noon, a waiter from the main lodge brings these fledgling Hemingways and Cathers a box lunch and puts it on the front stoop of the cottage. Very quietly puts it on the stoop, so as not to disturb the creative trance of the cabin’s occupant. One room of each cabin is the writing room. In the other is a cot for that all-important afternoon nap . . . . or, perhaps, for a revivifying bounce with one of the other attendees.

  In the evening, all members of the colony gather in the lodge for dinner and intoxicating conversation with the writers in residence. Later, before a roaring fire in the parlor, marshmallows are toasted, popcorn is popped, wine is drunk, and the stories of the colony attendees are read aloud and then critiqued.

  To me, this sounded like an absolutely enchanted writing environment. I especially liked the part about having your lunch left at the front door, deposited there as quietly as the tooth fairy deposits a quarter under a kid’s pillow. I imagine it appealed because it’s so far from my own experience, where the creative flow is apt to be stopped at any moment by a message from my wife that the toilet is plugged up and would I try to fix it, or a call from the office telling me that I’m in imminent danger of blowing yet another dental appointment. At times like that I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece.

  In truth, 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. And the larger the work looms in my day—the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna—the more problematic it can become. One serious problem with writers’ workshops is that I hafta becomes the rule. You didn’t come, after all, to wander lonely as a cloud, experiencing the beauty of the woods or the grandeur of the mountains. You’re supposed to be writing, dammit, if only so that your colleagues will have something to critique as they toast their goddam marshmallows there in the main lodge. When, on the other hand, making sure the kid gets to his basketball camp on time is every bit as important as your work in progress, there’s a lot less pressure to produce.

  And what about those critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter’s story, someone may say. It had something . . . . a sense of I don’t know . . . . there’s a loving kind of you know . . . . I can’t exactly describe it . . . .

  Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.

  And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teachers and writers in residence are nodding, smiling, and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can’t describe, you might just be, I don’t know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

  Non-specific critiques won’t help when you sit down to your second draft, and may hurt. Certainly none of the comments above touch on the language of your piece, or its narrative sense; these comments are just wind, offering no factual input at all.

  Also, daily critiques force you to write with the door constantly open, and in my mind that sort of defeats the purpose. What good does it do you to have the waiter tiptoe soundlessly up to the stoop of your cabin with your lunch and then tiptoe away with equal solicitous soundlessness, if you are reading your current work aloud every night (or handing it out on Xeroxed sheets) to a group of would-be writers who are telling you they like the way you handle tone and mood but want to know if Dolly’s cap, the one with the bells on it, is symbolic? The pressure to explain is always on, and a lot of your creative energy, it seems to me, is therefore going in the wrong direction. You find yourself constantly questioning your prose and your purpose when what you should probably be doing is writing as fast as the Gingerbread Man runs, getting that first draft down on paper while the shape of the fossil is still bright and clear in your mind. Too many writing classes make Wait a minute, explain what you meant by that a kind of bylaw.

  In all fairness, I must admit to a certain prejudice here: one of the few times I suffered a full-fledged case of writer’s block was during my senior year at the University of Maine, when I was taking not one but two creative-writing courses (one was the seminar in which I met my future wife, so it can hardly be counted as a dead loss). Most of my fellow students that semester were writing poems about sexual yearning or stories in which moody young men whose parents did not understand them were preparing to go off to Vietnam. One young woman wrote a good deal about the moon and her menstrual cycle; in these poems the moon always appeared as th m’n. She could not explain just why this had to be, but we all kind of felt it: th m’n, yeah, dig it, sister.

  I brought poems of my own to class, but back in my dorm room was my dirty little secret: the half-completed manuscript of a novel about a teenage gang’s plan to start a race-riot. They would use this for cover while ripping off two dozen loan-sharking operations and illegal drug-rings in the city of Harding, my fictional version of Detroit (I had never been within six hundred miles of Detroit, but I didn’t let that stop or even slow me down). This novel, Sword in the Darkness, seemed very tawdry to me when compared to what my fellow students were trying to achieve; which is why, I suppose, I never brought any of it to class for a critique. The fact that it was also better and somehow truer than all my poems about sexual yearning and post-adolescent angst only made things worse. The result was a four-month period in which I could write almost nothing at all. What I did instead was drink beer, smoke Pall Malls, read John D. MacDonald paperbacks, and watch afternoon soap operas.

  Writing courses and seminars do offer at least one undeniable benefit: in them, the desire to write fiction or poetry is taken seriously. For aspiring writers who have been looked upon with pitying condescension by
their friends and relatives (“You better not quit your day job just yet!” is a popular line, usually delivered with a hideous Bob’s-yer-uncle grin), this is a wonderful thing. In writing classes, if nowhere else, it is entirely permissible to spend large chunks of your time off in your own little dreamworld. Still—do you really need permission and a hall-pass to go there? Do you need someone to make you a paper badge with the word WRITER on it before you can believe you are one? God, I hope not.

  Another argument in favor of writing courses has to do with the men and women who teach them. There are thousands of talented writers at work in America, and only a few of them (I think the number might be as low as five per cent) can support their families and themselves with their work. There’s always some grant money available, but it’s never enough to go around. As for government subsidies for creative writers, perish the thought. Tobacco subsidies, sure. Research grants to study the motility of unpreserved bull sperm, of course. Creative-writing subsidies, never. Most voters would agree, I think. With the exception of Norman Rockwell and Robert Frost, America has never much revered her creative people; as a whole, we’re more interested in commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint and Internet greeting-cards. And if you don’t like it, it’s a case of tough titty said the kitty, ‘cause that’s just the way things are. Americans are a lot more interested in TV quiz shows than in the short fiction of Raymond Carver.

  The solution for a good many underpaid creative writers is to teach what they know to others. This can be a nice thing, and it’s nice when beginning writers have a chance to meet with and listen to veteran writers they may have long admired. It’s also great when writing classes lead to business contacts. I got my first agent, Maurice Crain, courtesy of my sophomore comp teacher, the noted regional short story writer Edwin M. Holmes. After reading a couple of my stories in Eh-77 (a comp class emphasizing fiction), Professor Holmes asked Crain if he would look at a selection of my work. Crain agreed, but we never had much of an association—he was in his eighties, unwell, and died shortly after our first correspondence. I can only hope it wasn’t my initial batch of stories that killed him.

  You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi, post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. Writing-class discussions can often be intellectually stimulating and great fun, but they also often stray far afield from the actual nuts-and-bolts business of writing.

  Still, I suppose you might end up in a version of that sylvan writer’s colony in East Is East: your own little cottage in the pines, complete with word processor, fresh disks (what is so delicately exciting to the imagination as a box of fresh computer disks or a ream of blank paper?), the cot in the other room for that afternoon nap, and the lady who tiptoes to your stoop, leaves your lunch, and then tiptoes away again. That would be okay, I guess. If you got a chance to participate in a deal like that, I’d say go right ahead. You might not learn The Magic Secrets of Writing (there aren’t any—bummer, huh?), but it would certainly be a grand time, and grand times are something I’m always in favor of.

  – 15 –

  Other than Where do you get your ideas?, the questions any publishing writer hears most frequently from those who want to publish are How do you get an agent? and How do you make contact with people in the world of publishing?

  The tone in which these questions are asked is often bewildered, sometimes chagrined, and frequently angry. There is a commonly held suspicion that most newcomers who actually succeed in getting their books published broke through because they had an in, a contact, a rabbi in the business. The underlying assumption is that publishing is just one big, happy, incestuously closed family.

  It’s not true. Neither is it true that agents are a snooty, superior bunch that would die before allowing their ungloved fingers to touch an unsolicited manuscript. (Well okay, yeah, there are a few like that.) The fact is that agents, publishers, and editors are all looking for the next hot writer who can sell a lot of books and make lots of money . . . . and not just the next hot young writer, either; Helen Santmyer was in a retirement home when she published . . . . And Ladies of the Club. Frank McCourt was quite a bit younger when he published Angela’s Ashes, but he’s still no spring chicken.

  As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me.

  Still, I was aware that I had worlds to conquer beyond the pages of Cavalier, Gent, and Juggs. I wanted my stories to find the right markets, and that meant finding a way around the troubling fact that a good many of the best-paying ones (Cosmopolitan, for instance, which at that time published lots of short stories) wouldn’t look at unsolicited fiction. The answer, it seemed to me, was to have an agent. If my fiction was good, I thought in my unsophisticated but not entirely illogical way, an agent would solve all my problems.

  I didn’t discover until much later that not all agents are good agents, and that a good agent is useful in many other ways than getting the fiction editor at Cosmo to look at your short stories. But as a young man I did not yet realize that there are people in the publishing world—more than a few, actually—who would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes. For me, that didn’t really matter, because before my first couple of novels actually succeeded in finding an audience, I had little to steal.

  You should have an agent, and if your work is salable, you will have only a moderate amount of trouble finding one. You’ll probably be able to find one even if your work isn’t salable, as long as it shows promise. Sports agents represent minor leaguers who are basically playing for meal-money, in hopes that their young clients will make it to the bigs; for the same reason, literary agents are often willing to handle writers with only a few publishing credits. You’ll very likely find someone to handle your work even if your publishing credits are limited strictly to the “little magazines,” which pay only in copies—these magazines are often regarded by agents and book publishers as proving-grounds for new talent.

  You must begin as your own advocate, which means reading the magazines publishing the kind of stuff you write. You should also pick up the writers’ journals and buy a copy of Writer’s Market, the most valuable of tools for the writer new to the marketplace. If you’re really poor, ask someone to give it to you for Christmas. Both the mags and WM (it’s a whopper of a volume, but reasonably priced) list book and magazine publishers, and include thumbnail descriptions of the sort of stories each market uses. You’ll also find the most salable lengths and the names of editorial staffs.

  As a beginning writer, you’ll be most interested in the “little magazines,” if you’re writing short stories. If you’re writing or have written a novel, you’ll want to note the lists of literary agents in the writing magazines and in Writer’s Market. You may also want to add a copy of the LMP (Literary Market Place) to your reference shelf. You need to be canny, careful, and assiduous in your search for an agent or a publisher, but—this bears repeating—the most important thing you can do for yourself is read the market. Looking at the thumbnail rundowns in Writer’s Digest may help (“ . . . . publishes mostly mainstream fiction, 2,000–4,000 words, steer clear of stereotyped characters and hackneyed romance situations”), but a thumbnail is, leave us face it, just a thu
mbnail. 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.

  Here is the story of an aspiring writer I’ll call Frank. Frank is actually a composite of three young writers I know, two men and one woman. All have enjoyed some success in their twenties as writers; none, as of this writing, are driving Rolls-Royces. All three will probably break through, which is to say that by the age of forty, I believe, all three will be publishing regularly (and probably one will have a drinking problem).

  The three faces of Frank all have different interests and write in different styles and voices, but their approaches to the hurdles between them and becoming published writers are similar enough for me to feel comfortable about putting them together. I also feel that other beginning writers—you, for instance, dear Reader—could do worse than follow in Frank’s footsteps.

  Frank was an English major (you don’t have to be an English major to become a writer, but it sure doesn’t hurt) who began submitting his stories to magazines as a college student. He took several creative-writing courses, and many of the magazines to which he made submissions were recommended to him by his creative-writing teachers. Recommended or not, Frank carefully read the stories in each magazine, and submitted his own stories according to his sense of where each would fit best. “For three years I read every story Story magazine published,” he says, then laughs. “I may be the only person in America who can make that statement.”

  Careful reading or not, Frank didn’t publish any stories in those markets while attending college, although he did publish half a dozen or so in the campus literary magazine (we’ll call it The Quarterly Pretension). He received personal notes of rejection from readers at several of the magazines to which he submitted, including Story (the female version of Frank said, “They owed me a note!”) and The Georgia Review. During this time Frank subscribed to Writer’s Digest and The Writer, reading them carefully and paying attention to articles about agents and the accompanying agency lists. He circled the names of several who mentioned literary interests he felt he shared. Frank took particular note of agents who talked about liking stories of “high conflict,” an arty way of saying suspense stories. Frank is attracted to suspense stories, also to stories of crime and the supernatural.