It took me a few months to read On Writing by Stephen King.

Overall it’s a good book written literally by the King of horror writing. I am not a reader of King’s writing but this book surely gave me some wisdom.

Here’s my main take-aways:

  1. Accumulate rejections proudly

King mentions that as a way to remain motivated and keep trying again and again. He used to hail each rejection slip on a nail on his wall. When there were too many to be hung on the nail, he just used a longer nail!

2. Rules of writing

Even though King is not a “literary” author, he does share quite a few rules. There are common ones like show-don’t-tell and don’t use adverbs. My personal opinion is different on this topic and in the market there is a lot of flexibility even on show-don’t-tell but I think these are safe pieces of advices to avoid being easily rejected by a literary agent.

3. Write for the love of it

I especially like this piece of advice. King asserts that he would write for free. He did write for free for many years when none of it was being published anywhere. He talks about the passion for writing and encourages the reader (presumably a wanna-be-writer) to keep writing and not worry about whether or not it is generating monetary rewards.

I have been doing pretty much the same. I wrote three different novels (not published so far) and yet I kept writing. . .

4. Read a lot & write a lot


This is probably the best take-away from this book. King mentions that he wrote for years and read tons and tons of books even before anything written by him got published (he hates passive voice like this;).

Reading a lot is something I didn’t do before. My reading-to-writing ratio (my own invention) was very low but recently I have been reading a lot.
Speed reading:

King doesn’t mention that but I do: Skim read books as it’s better to have read 10 books in a year than to have just read one because it was just an awfully long book!

5. Be skeptical

This one is from me. King does not ask you do be skeptical but I do. I disagreed with King on several occasions while reading simply because he seemed to be suggesting with absolute confidence that there are certain principles that one has to follow and these principles make for a better writing. Show-not-tell is one such principle, according to King.

In this case I believe that showing-not-telling will make your story different, yes, but not necessarily better. In another blog I mentioned the same point. Same isn’t worse; different isn’t better.


The publishers and agent adhere to certain guidelines of writing and a never-before-published writer almost always has to follow these in order to break into the publishing world. Self-publishing is always an option but a whole different topic.

Overall On Writing is a pretty solid autobiography-cum-writing-advice book, more so if you like Stephen’s writings. I’m not a fan of horror genre, yet I enjoyed this book.