Chapter 78 - On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” by Stephen King.
Reading Before Writing
“You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework.”
— David Ogilvy
In his memoir, Stephen King mentions that to become a proficient writer, one must immerse themselves in both reading and writing. He emphasizes the importance of consuming a wide variety of literature to develop a keen sense of what constitutes good and bad writing. This practice not only helps in refining one's own style but also serves as a wellspring of inspiration.
As a matter of fact, Stephen King’s biggest advice for aspiring writers is to “strip your television’s electric plug-wire, wrap a spike around it, and then stick it back into the wall. See what blows, and how far. Just an idea.” King mentions this because he believes that television and most likely social media nowadays are a distraction and make people forget the importance of reading and immersing oneself into the written world.
"But TV came relatively late to the King household, and I'm glad. I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit."
—Stephen King
King's own journey as a writer began with imitation, a common starting point for many aspiring authors. He recalls that when he was younger, he would spent a lot time either in bed or at home reading through comic books, Tom Swift and Dawson and Jack London’s bloodcurdling animal tales. This certainly helped him to improve as a writer as he would start writing his own stories based on what he read. As King once said, “Imitation preceded creation.”
Furthermore, King believes that reading is a great way to build your vocabulary. In fact, he firmly believes that building one’s vocabulary should not be done through conscious effort, but through the natural process of reading widely. As he once said, "Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don't make any conscious effort to improve it. (You'll be doing that as you read, of course ... but that comes later.)"
King mentions that too often, writers mistakenly believe that they are great writers because they can use complex words in their texts. However, this is far from the truth. As a matter of fact, King believes in the power of using simple words as the task of a writer is to get an idea through to your reader. As he explains, “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. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.”
"Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word—of course you will, there's always another word—but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean."
— Stephen King
This reminds me of what we have learned from Richard Feynman. According to him, the secret of learning lays in understanding the true essence of a concept rather than learning names through memorisation. As a matter of fact, Feynman believed that to truly understand a concept, one must be able to explain it to a child with simple words rather than by using complex words. As Mortimer Adler once said, “The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
This illusion of knowledge is extremely dangerous as going beyond your circle of competence and not knowing it can cause serious issues. And, to make it worse, Feynman mentions that this fragility of knowledge is also susceptible among experts. As he once said, “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way-by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.”
— Richard Feynman
Finally, King’s importance put into reading reminds me of what we have learned from Charlie Munger. Munger, like many great people before him, believed that the fastest way to earn wisdom is to learn from the success and failure of others. As a matter of fact, life is way too short to learn everything on your own, and that’s without saying how much pain we can avoid by learning from mistakes of others instead of committing them ourselves.
As Munger once said, “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
In the case of Munger, he loved to read biographies as it is a great way to learn from the masters of each disciplines. Here’s how he explains it:
“I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the “eminent dead,” but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.”
— Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, is considered one of the greatest investor of all-time. Buffett and Munger’s track record at Berkshire is exceptional, returning over 19.8% compounded annual gain from 1965 to 2022 compared to only 9.9% for the S&P 500 Index. What’s the secret to their success? Well, I believe that part of the reason is because both Munger and Buffett are compounding learning machine. As a matter of fact, Munger mentions that he doesn’t know any single successful investor who do not read voraciously.
“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
— Charlie Munger
Purpose of Writing
“A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”
— Paul Graham
For King, the purpose of writing is more than just a means to fame or financial success. He views it as a form of enrichment for both the writer and the reader, a way to explore and communicate truths about life and human experiences.
As a matter of fact, he sees writing as a way to communicate between the writer and the reader in some form of telepathy. As he once said, “All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation.”
Here’s how Stephen King explains this concept of telepathy that demonstrates the fact that “books are a uniquely portable magic” :
“So let’s assume that you’re in your favorite receiving place just as I am in the place where I do my best transmitting. We’ll have to perform our mentalist routine not just over distance but over time as well, yet that presents no real problem; if we can still read Dickens, Shakespeare, and (with the help of a footnote or two) Herodotus, I think we can manage the gap between 1997 and 2000. And here we go—actual telepathy in action. You’ll notice I have nothing up my sleeves and that my lips never move. Neither, most likely, do yours.
Look—here’s a table covered with a red cloth. On it is a cage the size of a small fish aquarium. In the cage is a white rabbit with a pink nose and pink-rimmed eyes. In its front paws is a carrot-stub upon which it is contentedly munching. On its back, clearly marked in blue ink, is the numeral 8. Do we see the same thing? We’d have to get together and compare notes to make absolutely sure, but I think we do. There will be necessary variations, of course: some receivers will see a cloth which is turkey red, some will see one that’s scarlet, while others may see still other shades. (To colorblind receivers, the red tablecloth is the dark gray of cigar ashes.) Some may see scalloped edges, some may see straight ones. Decorative souls may add a little lace, and welcome—my tablecloth is your tablecloth, knock yourself out. (…) This is what we’re looking at, and we all see it. I didn’t tell you. You didn’t ask me. I never opened my mouth and you never opened yours. We’re not even in the same year together, let alone the same room … except we are together. We’re close. We’re having a meeting of the minds.”
— Stephen King
The importance of writing and of learning how to write well reminds of Benjamin Franklin’s famous saying that “all should be taught to write a fair hand, and swift, as that is useful to all.” As a matter of fact, as a printer and publisher, Franklin was able to see the impact of his writing in improving the daily life of himself and of others Philadelphians. This is because of the mere fact that writing can be seen as a way of learning.
As a matter of fact, by writing about a topic at hand, you must be able to compress your ideas into words which requires both understanding and thinking. As Stephen King once said, “Writing is refined thinking.” As such, writing is a great process to understand things better yourself and to identify the topics that you understand from those that you do not know what you are talking about.
Furthermore, writing is a great tool for better decision making. In fact, by keeping a decision journal at hand, you will be able to collect feedbacks from your previous decisions in the hope of making better decisions in the future. Writing it down on a journal is crucial as it allows you to review all the circumstances and accessible knowledge you had at the time of your decision and to truly evaluate it without being obstructed by hindsight bias.
“Go down to a local drugstore and buy a very cheap notebook and start keeping track of your decisions. And the specific idea is whenever you’re making a consequential decision, something going in or out of the portfolio, just take a moment to think, write down what you expect to happen, why you expect it to happen and then actually, and this is optional, but probably a great idea, is write down how you feel about the situation, both physically and even emotionally. Just, how do you feel? I feel tired. I feel good, or this stock is really draining me. Whatever you think.
The key to doing this is that it prevents something called hindsight bias, which is no matter what happens in the world, we tend to look back on our decision-making process, and we tilt it in a way that looks more favorable to us, right? So we have a bias to explain what has happened.”
— Daniel Kahneman
How to Write
“You can make anything by writing.”
– C.S. Lewis
In his memoir, Stephen King believes that writing is an innate talent. In fact, he once said, "I don't believe writers can be made, either by circumstances or by self-will." However, even if we weren’t meant to be aspiring writers, improving our writing skills is still possible and essential. One way of doing this is by writing regularly. Stephen King mentions that a great way of doing this by setting a daily writing goal, starting with a modest target to avoid discouragement:
“By the time you step into your new writing space and close the door, you should have settled on a daily writing goal. As with physical exercise, it would be best to set this goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I'm feeling magnanimous, I'll also suggest that you can take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you'll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.”
— Stephen King
In his book, Stephen King is kind enough to share with us a few concepts to help us improve as writers. And, the most important tenet is to keep things simple. As a matter of fact, he provides us a list of things we must avoid in order to write better:
Avoid passive verbs: King believes that "With an active verb, the subject of the sentence is doing something. With a passive verb, something is being done to the subject of the sentence. The subject is just letting it happen. You should avoid the passive tense."
Avoid the overuse of adverbs: King explains that "The adverb is not your friend. Adverbs, he said sternly. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/ she isn't expressing himself/ herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across." Or as Mark Twain once said, “Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very’; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.”
Avoid the use of other verbs outside of “say” in a dialogue attribution: King mentions that “The best form of dialogue attribution is said, as in he said, she said, Bill said, Monica said.”
Furthermore, King believes that the root of most bad writing comes from fear. As a matter of fact, a bad writer usually thinks he or she needs to use adverbs or complex words because they are fearful that he or she isn’t expressing himself or herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. However, King believes that these actions tend to lead to opposite effects.
King mentions that “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. (…) Good writing is also about making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with.” According to King, if you don’t have a good toolbox, an easy way to write better is to strictly use noun-verb sentences; once again, a proof of the power of keeping things simple.
"Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that's nice. The simplicity of noun-verb construction is useful—at the very least it can provide a safety net for your writing."
— Stephen King
Finally, King mentions the necessity to rewrite in order to keep your writing as simple as possible. King explains that the best lesson he received in terms of writing came from his English literature teacher, John Gould, who once told him, “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.”
As a matter of fact, King’s approach to writing involves a structured process that begins with the first draft. Once that is done, he recommends a period of rest before beginning the rewriting process. As he explains, “If you've never done it before, you'll find reading your book over after a six- week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It's yours, you'll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It's always easier to kill someone else's darlings than it is to kill your own.”
King mentions that in his rewriting process, or the second draft, he will try to remove all unnecessary words in order to speed up the story. His formula is simple: “2nd Draft = 1st Draft minus 10%.” A formula to works every time.
Beyond the Book
Read "Writing to Think" by Farnam Street
Read "Unlock the Power of Effective Writing: Insights from Steven Pinker" by Farnam Street
Read "The Surprising Reason Writing Remains Essential in an AI-Driven World" by Farnam Street
Read "Creating a Decision Journal: Template And Example Included" by Farnam Street
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