On Writing

The Book in Three Sentences

• Most people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened with practice.
• The writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.
• Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea.

The Five Big Ideas

• “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”
• “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference.”
• “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.”
• “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.”
• “Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful.”

On Writing Summary

• Stephen believes most people have at least some talent as writers and storytellers, and that those talents can be strengthened and sharpened with practice.
• “Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.”
• “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
• The most important Stephen learned from Carrie White is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping 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.
• “[Writing] 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.”
• “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 is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes.”
• “The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
• “Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind if it is appropriate and colorful.”
• “If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course, you will, there’s always another word—but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”
• “Nouns and verbs are the two indispensable parts of writing. Without one of each, no group of words can be a sentence, since a sentence is, by definition, a group of words containing a subject (noun) and a predicate (verb); these strings of words begin with a capital letter, end with a period, and combine to make a complete thought which starts in the writer’s head and then leaps to the reader’s.”
• “Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float.”
• “The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing.”
• “Verbs come in two types, active and passive. With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense.”
• “The adverb is not your friend.”
• “Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs.”
• “I insist that you use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions … and not even then, if you can avoid it.”
• “The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said.”
• “You always add ’s, even when the word you’re modifying ends in s—always write Thomas’s bike and never Thomas’ bike.”
• “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.”
• “Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.”
• “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.”
• “What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story. The latter is good. The former is not.”
• “In my view, stories and novels consist of three parts: narration, which moves the story from point A to point B and finally to point Z; description, which creates a sensory reality for the reader; and dialogue, which brings characters to life through their speech.”
• “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”
• “One of the cardinal rules of good fiction is never tell us a thing if you can show us.”
• “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.”
• “Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme; it almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.”
• “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.”
• “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing.”
• “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
• “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. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.”

Recommended Reading

If you likeOn Writing, you may also enjoy the following books:

• Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discoveredby Austin Kleon
• You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One)by Jeff Goins

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