Thoughts on Stephen Kings on writing

So what have I done this week towards my goal of writing.

I have finished reading On Writing by Stephen King which was a very interesting book.  An unusual mix of autobiography for the first half of the book and the second half of the book was all about how he wrote.

Both parts of the book were interesting, his childhood stories were amusing and reading about how he struggled to make money whilst working uninteresting jobs and writing at night was a great story because you were rooting for him to make it.

It brings to mind the Malcolm Gladwall book outliers where he talks about successful people have to put in 10000 hours to become world class at something.  This is usually an amount most people can't be bothered to put in because it takes extreme dedicated.

The fact that Stephen King wrote loads of short stories which kept not being taken and then slowly some of his stories would get purchased and the money he got really made a difference to his life because he was flat broke.

His writing style sounds sooooooo simple when writes it down.  He just has a simple idea, a what if someone could see into the future would it be ok to kill someone in order to stop them starting a world war.  This idea is interesting but the clever part is he twists the characters to make the person seeing in the future a bit of a git whilst the other person is a nice guy.

I guess like most brilliant ideas they are simple when you look at them afterwards.

He had one idea which I use where once he has finished the first draft he puts it in his drawer and then comes back to it weeks later.  This has the effect of allowing him to read the first draft almost as if it's written by someone else which means he isn't as protective of it e,g, it's hard to be brutal editing your work when it recently took you so long to create it.


So anyway I have finished that book, I am 100 pages into Writing Fiction for Dummies which is a very interesting book.  I have also purchased the book - First Draft in 30 days.

The reason I have brought this book is because I want to plan out my story better at the beginning and  I want to spend more time creating better characters.  The current Uncle Ben story I am writing doesn't have great characters in it and has run away from me a bit.

The first draft in 30 days goes through creating an outline for a story and creating characters etc. So I am looking forward to working through this.

I have also so far this week wrote 2000 words writing three days out of five so far.   I am happy to say I am very close to the end of my current short story (which is 18000 words and counting).  I have been working on this flipping thing for well over year but putting very little effort in.

The next story which I have been doing some planning this week is going to be much more exciting to work on the title is Download.