On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Book

Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You are right there with the young author as he is tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing baby-sitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash". But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing".King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph and literary models. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo, Amazon.comRead More

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  • Amazon

    At last...the Number 1 bestselling writer offers a unique insight into his life and work as well as inspiring advice and instruction on writing.

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    An autobiographical portrait of Stephen King's home life his family and his traumatic recent accident. He offers an insight into his world as well as analysis advice and instruction on writing. Find out what books and films influenced the young writer his first idea for a story the true life tale that inspired "Carrie". Citing examples of his work and those of his contemporaries such as John Grisham and Raymond Chandler King gives tips for writers on how to avoid pitfalls and how to use the tools of the trade from building characters to pace and plotting the importance of dialogue and description - as well as practical advice on presentation and representation. Discover the symbolism themes and the three deep interests that power all his work.

  • 0340820462
  • 9780340820469
  • Stephen King
  • 1 September 2001
  • New English Library
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 384
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