InsaneJournal

Current mood:	impressed
Current music:	Buddy Holly

On Writing:  Further Proof that Stephen King is a Genius

I just have to say that Stephen King is a freaking genius. I'm reading On Writing, and wow. I'm only on like page 44 and I've already learned a lot. I'm not sending this book back to Booksfree, I'm keeping it, and highlighting the best parts.

I'm working on "Skin Deep," and I have this whole like page and a half that I thought I might want to take out. Then today at lunch I read about how as a teenager, King wrote an article for his local newspaper, and when he handed it in, the editor crossed out like a third of it. He said that was the most important lesson he ever learned about writing...

"When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story... When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."

OMG. What a revelation. Take out everything that's NOT the story. I guess it kind of seems like common sense, but it's not as easy as it sounds. I mean, I was already sort of doing that since I saw the beginning of Secret Window, where Johnny Depp types a few lines and goes, "That's just bad writing.... You know what you have to do," then he deletes the whole thing. I do that bit in my head whenever I erase stuff, and sometimes out loud. It probably scares people on the train.

I already learned some stuff from King, even before I read On Writing. I read somewhere that he doesn't like adverbs, and reading his books, I realized he hardly ever uses them. Instead, he uses analogies and similes and what not. So when I wrote "Danielle's Autopsy Table," I tried to use as little adverbs as possible. I ended up using a lot of hyphens, but it worked. So for "Skin Deep," I'm avoiding adverbs, AND cutting out anything that's NOT the story. Wow. It makes so much sense it makes me want to vomit. That didn't make any sense.

In other writing news, no one is biting on my book idea. I'm almost ready to just scrap it. Either that, or I'm going to label myself as a "horror writer." I didn't want to have to do that, but I think it will help weed out the people who might get scared away once I send them to my fictionpress page. Maybe if I advertise in more cities, and look for a specific genre, I'll have better luck.

I guess I am a horror writer anyway, though I'd consider my writing to be about two thirds horror and one third.. anti-social. Horror's just what I seem to be writing lately. I'm getting it all out now, after keeping it bottled up for like ten years, since that time my mom freaked at me when she read "Five Seconds." Oh, I found some comforting words about that in On Writing too, when King was talking about a teacher who asked him why he was wasting his talent writing "junk." He said he felt ashamed of his writing for years after that...

"I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all."

This book, seriously, is like my new handbook for life.. after the Bible. They can put that quote on the book jacket: "Jen Heller Meservey says, 'This book is my new handbook for life.'" Have I said wow yet? Wow.