Bad Writing Advice from Stephen King's ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT

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Back in the year 2000, Stephen King published his book, On Writing, a memoir of the craft.
Since then, it's become the go-to book for new writers.
It's hard to find a list of books for writers that doesn't include this one, and if you look at the best books for writers on Goodreads, this one is number one.
The only problem is, it's packed full of bad, unhelpful advice for new and amateur writers.
In this video, I'm going to walk you through the bad advice in the book, why it's wrong, and what you can actually do to level up your craft as a writer.
My name is Tim Grawl.
I'm the CEO of StoryGrid, where we help you build the skills, write a book, and leave your legacy.
My partner Sean Coyne is the creator and founder of StoryGrid, and he is a writer and editor with over 30 years of experience.
Let me tell you something about Steve King.
Steve King wishes he could write like me.
So first off, I'm a big fan of Stephen King.
I love his writing.
My favorite novel of all time is 112263.
I love his writing in Green Mile, Gwendy's Button Box, Joyland, Needful Things, and many other books.
I even love On Writing.
And what I love about Stephen King is he loves writing.
He loves the storytelling, the act of writing, everything that goes into it.
The only problem is, it's not very helpful to new writers.
The thing is that Stephen King submitted his first story for publication to a magazine called Spaceman way back in 1960.
He was 12 years old.
Fast forward 14 years, it's 1974, and he publishes his first book, Carrie, which went on to be a huge bestseller, and he was 26 years old.
By the year 2000, when On Writing came out, he was 53 years old and had been writing for over 40 years.
And all of this extensive knowledge and experience as a writer leads to three problems with this book.
The first problem is he's forgotten what it's like to be a beginner.
The last time he was a newbie writer, he was a tween.
Like, imagine that.
First of all, just try to think back to when you were a tween and anything you were doing at that point.
And then think about something that you've been doing for over 40 years.
It's almost impossible to put yourself back in the shoes of a beginner.
Which leads us to the problem number two.
The advice given in this book is from someone that knows how to consistently write well.
So much advice in the book is tied to this idea that he can write consistently well, and so his first drafts are pretty good.
He doesn't require a ton of editing because he's an expert that's been doing this, and that is not the position new and amateur writers find themselves in.
Problem number three is that almost everything he does in writing is intuitive.
What you find when you work with professional writers is that most of them do it very intuitively, and they don't really understand how they do it.
However, if you ask them how they write, they will talk for a long time.
They just won't say stuff that will actually help you become a better writer.
There is a huge gap between being really good at something and being able to teach something.
This is why Tiger Woods, even at the height of his golf career, still had a golf coach.
Because being able to do something is different than being able to teach it.
So now let's just break down the bad advice, and I'm just going to start with the just straight up condescending bits of this book.
About halfway through the book, he pauses to give his thesis, and part of that thesis is this.
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
So this just isn't true.
Like, I know this in my own life.
I was a horribly bad writer.
I became a competent writer, and now I'm a pretty good writer.
We're going to lay great writer off to the side, because it's even hard to wrap our heads around what that is.
But this idea that you can't be a bad writer and then become a competent and then good writer is just nuts.
Like, again, if I went back to when he was 10 years old and trying to write, I'm sure his first writing was bad writing, and yet he's forgotten what that's like.
And we see this all the time in the story grid, is we can take somebody that's just a legitimately bad writer, and if they learn the basic skills, they can become a competent and good writer.
Let's look at the next one.
This is where he addresses this idea of talent.
He says that talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless.
Now, I get what he's saying.
In the context of this passage, what he's saying is writing shouldn't feel like work.
You should look forward to it.
You should be excited to sit down and write.
And if it feels like work, then you don't have the talent.
You should basically give up.
And again, I just don't think this is true.
Most of us that are coming to writing when we're later in life, the problem is we've wanted to do it a long time, and now we're actually trying to sit down and do it.
And just because it takes some work to get us in that chair and typing the words, doesn't mean we don't have this magical thing called talent.
What we do have is responsibilities and jobs and decades of voices in our head from family members saying we're wasting our time.
We have all of those things that we're trying to work past.
So when I read this, I feel like it can just be really demoralizing if you're a new writer just trying to get in the seat and start writing.
And you read this, and you think, well, maybe I just don't have the talent.
And that isn't necessarily true.
Next up, let's look at this advice around read a lot and write a lot.
He has lots of passages on this one.
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.
Can I be blunt on this subject?
If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write.
Simple as that.
I like to get 10 pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words.
That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a good-ish length for a book, something in which the reader can happily get lost.
I suggest 1,000 words a day.
And because I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll also suggest that you take one day a week off, at least to begin with.
You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot.
And the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.
Now, I have a whole video dedicated to this advice of read a lot and write a lot, and why it isn't true, and it doesn't work, and it is full of this idea of survivorship bias.
But I'm just going to stop here and say, this idea that the only way that you can learn writing is to just churn out 1,000 words a day and then read a lot of books is, again, kind of nuts.
First of all, there's lots of people that read a lot, and they can't write.
There's lots of people that write a lot, and they also are writing bad.
This is what we teach all the time at Story Grid, that there are basic skills that you can learn as a writer, and actually focusing on those and working on those is a shortcut.
You still have to learn them.
It's still hard work, but it's not random.
This idea that you just read a lot and then churn out 1,000 words a day and write these really long manuscripts where none of it works, and you just kind of hope one day it'll work, that's not how writing and learning how to write should work.
It should be a systematic process of learning skills.
So if you want to hear more about this, go down the description.
I have a link to my video talking about this myth of read a lot and write a lot.
About a third of the way through the book, Stephen King introduces this idea of a toolbox.
I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you.
Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work.
This part I can get on board with.
The idea that you have a toolbox and then you're going to put tools in there and build up the skills to use those tools is exactly what we teach at Story Grid.
But when we talk about what these skills are, this is where I split ways from Stephen King and what he writes and on writing.
Because he spends a lot of time talking about things that aren't that important, and then on the things that are important, he gives really vague and unhelpful advice.
So first, let's look at the thing that most of us have heard about this idea of adverbs.
His basic idea is avoid them at all costs.
So at one point he says the adverb is and then he says I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs.
But then if you back up about a 80 pages from when he wrote that, he has this sentence.
They were boringly wholesome.
And I don't know about you, but that's kind of a weird adverb.
I actually thought he put it in there tongue-in-cheek, but it was so far before his opinions on adverbs that, well, I think he meant to put it there.
Now the real problem comes when you read these writers' books is they use adverbs.
And so this idea that so many authors, including Stephen King, talks about how evil adverbs are and how you shouldn't use adverbs, and then you read their writing and you're like, there's an adverb, there's another adverb, there's an adverb.
So how do you know when to use adverbs and when not to use adverbs?
Because they just kind of say this blanket, be careful and don't use that many, but they don't really tell you how to know.
Well, thankfully, we actually know how to use adverbs here at StoryGrid.
And there's a really simple rule and it takes a minute to explain it.
So I've already done a video on it.
So that's down in the description as well.
That one's called how to unbore your writing.
And it's just a really simple idea about when you should use adverbs and when you shouldn't.
And once you do that, you'll understand.
And this is one of those first moments in the book where the advice is just so vague.
It's not really helpful.
When you read it, it feels like, Ooh, I'm learning something.
And then when you go to put it into practice, it's not actually helpful.
So let's look at the next one.
So the next one, he starts talking about paragraph length.
He says in fiction, the paragraph is less structured.
It's the beat instead of the actual melody.
But then when you keep reading and you try to see what his advice is, it's something around read books that are like yours and then try to make the paragraphs about the same amount of length.
But again, it's so vague as to be unhelpful.
Then we move on to about it.
As with all the other aspects of fiction, the key to writing good dialogue is honesty.
And if you are honest about the words coming out of your character's mouth, you'll find that you've let yourself in for a fair amount of criticism.
Again, this is where I want to tie back to this idea that he's been doing this for 40 years at this point.
And when he has characters, they're so clear in his mind and they are locked in so clearly.
He really does feel like he's just listening to what they say and writing it down.
Unfortunately for new and amateur writers, it doesn't work that way because I've actually read the writing where people just kind of say what they think the character is saying, and it's not very good.
There are some specific things that you can learn that will make your dialogue better.
The first is objects of desire, being really, really clear on what your characters want, understanding essential tactics, which is how your characters go about getting the things that they want and making sure that there's plenty of tension and conflict in your scenes with competing objects of desire.
Now, again, I've addressed this in another video, but the idea here is that every character in every scene should have differing and conflicting objects of desire.
This is what drives the conflict.
And once you have that conflict in place, knowing what your character should say and when becomes a lot easier, but it is not just as telling the truth, whatever that really is when it comes to fiction.
If you want to use that kind of language, take it out in the street.
For me, I think the most frustrating part of this book is when he started talking about themes.
So I've got a couple longer passages I want to share here, and they kind of get this point across of why it was so frustrating for me.
I have never hesitated to ask myself either before starting the second draft of a book, or while stuck for an idea in the first draft, just what it is I'm writing about.
Why I'm spending the time when I could be playing my guitar or riding my motorcycle, what got my nose down to the grindstone in the first place and then kept it there.
And then just a little bit later, he says this.
I should close this little sermonette with a word of warning.
Starting with the questions and thematic concerns is a recipe for bad fiction.
Good fiction always begins with story and progresses to theme, and almost never begins with theme and progresses to story.
The only possible exceptions to this rule that I can think of are allegories like George Orwell's Animal Farm, and I have a sneaking suspicion that with Animal Farm, the story idea may indeed have come first.
If I see Orwell in the afterlife, I mean to ask him.
But once your basic story is on paper, you need to think about what it means and enrich your following drafts with your conclusions.
To do less is to rob your work and eventually your readers of the vision that makes each tale you write uniquely your own.
So first of all, he's just factually wrong about George Orwell.
George Orwell talks about in his essay, Why I Write, that he always comes up with an idea first, something he wants to see change in the world, and then that's what drives his writing.
So Orwell did, with his writing, pick the theme first and then write the story based on that theme.
And so what's weird to me is that this is the tool that King goes to when he gets stuck with his writing.
So whether he's halfway through a first draft, or he's now going on to the second draft, he pulls this idea of theme out and he uses that to find his way through his story.
So the idea that you want to consider this before you write is a little weird to me.
To have an idea of what you're trying to say with your book before you try to write it seems like a good idea to me.
Now, I see what he's saying.
If you try to just jam your theme down the reader's throat, that's not going to work.
But that doesn't work no matter when you use your theme.
So at StoryGrid, we are really adamant of getting clear about why you're writing the book, the kind of transformation you want to make in the reader, and having that in mind before you write the first word of your book.
And it in the woods while you're trying to write this book.
He obviously thinks theme is a good idea, and I just don't understand why he wouldn't recommend that you keep this in mind from the very beginning.
And at this point, we get to the idea of plot.
And this is the one he denigrates the most.
He says plot is, I think, the good writer's last resort and the dullard's first choice.
The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored.
And then he goes on to say his whole advice in coming up with his stories is he just comes up with a cool what-if scenario, and then he just starts writing.
And again, this is where his 40 years of experience just comes shining through, is that he is plotting.
The problem is he does it so intuitively, he doesn't understand that's what he's doing.
If you read his really great books, they all arc in the same sort of way.
The idea that you couldn't plan that out ahead of time, and you shouldn't plan it out ahead of time, is absolutely crazy.
I'm sure your drawer is just as full of mine of books that we just sat down, and we started writing, and we had a cool idea, and then they just kind of meander off into nowhere.
That's what I don't want to happen to you.
And if you structure your story ahead of time the right way, it gives you a roadmap so you don't wander off in the wilderness while you're trying to write.
So this idea that only bad writers would plot their book ahead of time, first of all, is nuts, because there's plenty of great writers that plot their book ahead of time.
But it is not the dullard's choice.
It's actually a good recommended way to plan out your book ahead of time, so you actually have an idea of what you're writing.
This is what I need.
So from there, he also spends some time talking about vocabulary, which he basically says use what you've got.
Grammar, which is just learn it and make sure that you have good grammar in your books, which makes sense.
He talks about using active voice instead of passive voice, some pretty common things, and I agree with those.
Use what you got.
Don't worry too much about vocabulary.
Yeah, you should know basic English or whatever language you're trying to write in.
Grammar.
And of course, you want to use the active voice most of the time instead of passive voice.
So let's look at the tools that Stephen King says should be in your toolbox.
He talks about adverbs, but you're don't go in there.
He talked about paragraph length, but he didn't really get specific about it.
But I guess that's in there.
He says dialogue, but that's just telling the truth.
Theme, but you're not really supposed to use it until much later in your book.
And plot is a horrible idea, and so we shouldn't be using plot.
You should have good vocabulary, good grammar, and use active voice instead of passive voice.
Now look at this list.
Is this really going to make you a better writer doing these things?
Like maybe you'll clean up your paragraph a little.
Maybe your dialogue will get slightly better, but is that truly what's wrong with your books and with your writing?
In fact, he boils down his whole book at one point by saying this.
We've covered some basic aspects of good storytelling, all of which return to the same core ideas that practice is invaluable and should feel good, really not like practice at all, and that honesty is indispensable.
Skills and dialogue and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity and without using a lot of tiresome unnecessary adverbs.
Now I just want to highlight this line right here.
It all boils down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear.
If you've read this book, you've tried this, and it doesn't work.
And so then what do you do?
Because all of his advice is encapsulated in this one sentence.
And so I'm going to come back to this point over and over.
He's been writing for over 40 years, so for him it really is just seeing clearly and writing down what he sees, but that's not really helpful for new and amateur writers.
At this point when he published this book on writing, he had been a published author for over 20 years.
So his advice is vague and unhelpful because he does things so intuitively that he doesn't really understand how he does them.
So I like this whole metaphor of a toolbox and having tools in there and the skills to use them, but when you try to follow his advice on the tools and building the skills to use them, it's so vague to be unhelpful.
So the last bit of bad advice I want to touch on is what he says to do once you have a finished manuscript.
So you've written a manuscript, it's done, now what do you do?
So basically after letting it sit for a while, he says you need to sit down and read it.
And he says, do it all in one sitting if that's possible.
It won't be of course if your book is a four or five hundred pager.
Make all the notes you want, but concentrate on the mundane housekeeping jobs like fixing misspellings and picking up inconsistencies.
There'll be plenty, only God gets it right the first time, and only a slob says, oh well, let it go, that's what copy editors are for.
During that toolbox concerns, knocking out pronouns with unclear antecedents, I hate and mistrust pronouns, every one of them as slippery as a fly-by-night personal injury lawyer, adding clarifying phrases where they seem necessary, and of course deleting all the adverbs I can bear to part with, never all of them, never enough.
So what do we see him focusing on here on his first read of his first draft as a book?
He's fixing misspellings, he's fixing pronouns, he's redoing sentences, he's What does this say about him as a writer?
That his first draft works, that he's a pro, that when he sits down and he writes a first draft, it probably mostly works.
Now you can argue with this with certain of his books, but over the career he writes great books, and so he writes the first draft and it mostly works.
But for new and amateur writers, your draft is not going to work.
It's going to have huge major macro problems, and the idea that you should sit and fix synod structure and misspellings instead of look at the macro structure of your story and find the problems is a recipe for insanity, because I have done that.
That's what I would do.
I'd get my first draft, I'd say Stephen King would let it sit in a drawer for a little bit, so I'd let it sit in the drawer for a little bit, then I'd pull it out, I'd read the whole thing, I'd fix misspelling, I'd fix pronouns, I'd show it to an editor, and they would tell me that the book didn't work.
So I just wasted all of that time and effort fixing misspellings.
It's like that old adage of shining the brass and the titanic as it's going down.
And so then he goes on to say he basically writes a draft, writes another draft, and gives it a polish.
After the drafts, he gives it to five or six friends, which gives him some feedback that he may or may not incorporate depending on what he wants to do, and then it's done and it's off to the publisher.
And if this is you, if this is you, congratulations, you're a great writer, you can write a great first draft.
After one or two drafts, it's ready for a polish and send it off to the editor.
But that's not where new and amateur writers find themselves.
And he's not even clear on what each draft is for.
The way that we do things at StoryGrid is you write one draft, then you use the StoryGrid tools to find where the problems are in the draft, and you start with the big macro problems first.
Then you go back and you write a second draft, specifically fixing those specific problems.
Then you do another round of edits where you're looking for specific problems with specific ways to fix them until you get all the way down to those little nitpicky things.
But you shouldn't fix your sentences if you have major story problems because it becomes just a waste of time.
Buddy, buddy, I ain't taking the rap on this.
I lock this place up every night.
It's not my fault if every pervert, weirdo, horny...
Go talk to someone in charge.
So I've spent all this time denigrating this book.
So let's talk about what did the book get right?
Did it get anything right?
Is it worth reading at all?
Stephen King is just a great writer.
So hearing him tell about his origin story, how he became a and he interlaces in the whole book little quips and stories from his own experience, it's just fun to read because he's a great writer.
And like I said, get the audiobook because hearing him talk about writing is just a joy.
I also want to go back all the way to the very beginning of the book.
There's actually three little forwards at the beginning of the book.
And the first one I want to reference is in the second forward.
And he said this, Fiction writers, present company included, don't understand very much about what they do, not why it works when it's good, not why it doesn't when it's bad.
Okay, so this is right on the money.
And it kind of cracked me up when I went back and I saw this when I was reading through the book.
And then I put it in my notes that he told us right at the beginning of the book that he didn't know what the fuck he was doing.
And so I just love that, that he told you up front, you probably shouldn't listen to him.
But then he went on and wrote 300 pages about how to write that were very helpful.
Now, I don't think this is true.
I do think that you can actually learn specific skills and you can know when you're doing it right.
And doing it wrong.
This is completely what we've dedicated ourselves to a story grid.
But I do love this idea that he put it right in the beginning that he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
In the next one, in the third forward, he also says this, one rule of the road, not directly stated elsewhere in this book, is the editor is always right.
So story grid was created by Sean Coyne, my partner, over 30 years of editing experience, looking at stories, understanding them, and having a really stellar track record in helping take books that were somewhat working and turning them into working books.
And then we've developed an entire narrative theory here at story grid that we teach you from the ground up, all based on his editing and writing experience.
So I can get on board with this one, that the editor is always right.
So what else did he get right in this book?
First of all, he talked about critique groups being super unhelpful.
He said, how valuable are the critiques not vary in my experience, sorry, a lot of them are maddingly vague.
I love the feeling of Peter 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.
Again, this is what we do at story grid is get away from this vague, unhelpful feedback and be able to give specific feedback.
So I agree with this just kind of random critique groups with other writers aren't very helpful.
The other thing he talks about is having your ideal reader in mind.
Now for him, it was his wife.
And it gets a little clunky, because is he thinking about who's going to read the book in the marketplace?
Or is he writing it for one specific person?
And we call this in story grid, Sam, the single audience member, this is part of our narrative device.
Again, there's a link down in the description.
But I did really like this part because he talks about writing the book for one person and having that person in mind when you're writing that book.
And we think that is really important in story grid.
Okay, so what to do with this book?
What do what do with this book on writing?
Again, I've read it many times, I went back read it two more times, put a bunch of post-its in it just for this video.
If you want a well written backstory of a great writer and what it took for him to become great.
It's a fun read.
If you're a new or amateur writer looking for specific advice on how to level up your writing, this is not the book for you.
Don't read it for that.
You're not going to get that.
And if you try to get that out of it, you're going to end up frustrated and wasting your time.
Now there are lots of ways to actually level up your writing.
I've talked about some of those in this video, but this is what we do here on the story grid channel and at the story grid website.
So make sure you like this video, subscribe to this channel and hit the bell so that you get all of the future videos we release.
Go to storygrid.com, sign up for the newsletter, check out the other resources.
That way you can get the most out of what we're doing at story grid.
But as always, thanks for being a part of our community.
Thanks for being a writer and I'll see you next time.
And now may the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and comfort you and lift you up and give you peace.
Amen.
As a postscript to this video, I do want to share my favorite line in the entire book.
So Stephen King is talking about the genre you might write in and you'll probably end up writing the things you love to read.
And I think that's fantastic.
And Stephen King has also taken a lot of criticism over the years about his horror writing and all this stuff in his books.
And then he had this line, I was built with a love of the night and the unquiet coffin.
That's all.
If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders.
It's what I have.
When it comes to our writing, a lot of times we feel this pressure on what we should be writing.
Maybe we feel it from the writer groups that we're in, where we should be writing something more sophisticated or literary, or maybe we have the voices of our family or religion in our head saying, Oh no, you can't use those four letter words or, Oh, you can't write about sex.
But yet that's, you know, that's what you want to write about.
And I just love this line because it reminds me that what I want to write about, what I want to bring to the page is good enough and that's okay.
And so this line, I just love this line because again, Stephen King loves writing.
He knows who he is as a writer and he's written some truly, truly masterpiece fiction that I have loved.
And so I appreciate that he did his best to share what he knew with us, uh, in this book.
Um, kind of missed the mark on actually helpful advice, but we did get to hear about his background of a writer.
And this line meant a lot to me because it means, Hey, whatever you want to write about, that's good enough.
All right.
So I'm going to end there.
I hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you next time.