If you want to write, I suggest you read this book. An interesting list, but with a handful of exceptions, it lists mostly Anglophone writers from the West. He also shares a list of must-read books. I loved his passion about his craft, although I didn’t always agree with him.Īt the end of the book-normally the annexes, but here referred to as “And Furthermore”-King shares a first draft of his writing and the edited version. He hates adverbs and the passive tense with a passion (and people who say “That’s so cool!”). I like King’s style-he addresses the reader throughout, and feels strongly about most things. There is a lot more good advice here, which I won’t go into. And if you want to be a writer, you must read voraciously. The hard work is critical-there are no shortcuts. He makes two points: one is that “good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals” and the second that with hard work, dedication and timely help, it is possible to make a good writer out of a competent one. King says that a writer needs to have a similar toolbox, with the first level containing the “common tools”: grammar and vocabulary: “as the whore said to the bashful sailor, ‘It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it’”. King leads into the “how to” part of the book with a piece about his grandfather’s toolbox: a large handmade wooden box, with three levels and a silk lining of “pinkish-red cabbage roses fading into a smog of grease and dirt”. Recovery was slow and painful and finishing the book helped him through it. In the last section, he writes about a terrible accident he had halfway through writing this book. Sometimes his books give a a glimpse into what he was going through when he wrote them: for example, Jack, the main character in The Shining is an alcoholic writer.

You follow him from his childhood as a budding writer all the way to his huge success, his marriage, his battle with alcohol and drugs, and going clean. the kind that look as if they might like to grab and eat you”. He describes his memories as a “fogged-out landscape from which occasional memories appear like isolated trees. Stephen King starts and ends the book with a series of vignettes from his life. This book is far more than a primer on writing well. Writers invent, but also draw upon what they know. This book on writing starts with two contradictory epigraphs: “Honesty is the best policy” and “Liars prosper”.

Steven king tool box writing