notes I took while devouring Stephen King's "On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft"
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v o c a b u l a r y
“one of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”
♦ use the first one that comes to your mind if it is appropriate and colorful
passive verb: something is being done to the subject of the sentence
the subject is just letting it happen
The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa.
The rope was thrown by the writer.
My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun.
active verb: the subject of the sentence is doing something
Freddy & Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa.
The writer threw the rope.
My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I’ll never forget it.
The adverb is not your friend.
♦ He closed the door firmly.
♦ He slammed the door.
use the adverb in dialogue attribution only in the rarest and most special of occasions… and not even then, if you can avoid it.
“while writing adverbs is human,
to write he said or she said is divine.”
writing is refined thinking
elements of style
♦ “It is possible to overuse the well-turned fragment… but frags can also work beautifully to streamline narration, create clear images, and create tension as well as to vary the prose-line.”
“The boat was thirty feet of sleek, white fiberglass with gray trim.
Tall masts, the sails tied. Satori painted on the hull in black script edged with gold.”
– Survival of the Fittest, Jonathan Kellerman
“If you want to be a good writer, you must do two things above all others:
read a lot and write a lot.”
• 1,000 words a day // take one day off a week
♦ there's a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story
♦ narration: never tell us a thing if you can show us instead!
o description: description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s
◼ dialogue: dialogue is a skill best learned by people who enjoy talking and listening to others—particularly listening, picking up the accents, rhythms, dialect, and slang of various groups
make sure these fictional folks behave in ways that will both help the story and seem reasonable to us, given what we know about them (and what we know about real life, of course).
once your book is done, let is rest 6 weeks minimum.
2nd draft = 1st draft – 10%
most important thing to remember about back story:
♦ everyone has a history
♦ most of it isn’t very interesting
if there’s a gun on the mantel in Act I,
it must go off in Act II.
you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start,
you will.
