On ‘On Writing’

Stephen King’s book is far more than a manual for fiction writing— it’s a philosophy for creative work

Stephen King’s On Writing had a huge influence on me when I finally read it; it’s a big part of the reason I’ve started putting a lot more papers out in recent years. It didn’t influence how much I write, so much as how I approach writing, and work in general. The specifics of writing mass-market fiction (King advises against adverbs, strongly) aren’t particularly relevant if you’re writing scientific papers, or even science writing for a general audience. Rather, what I found so valuable was his approach to creative work. He thinks you should approach this more or less like regular work, work you do with your hands. His philosophy applies well not just to novels, but to any large, complicated project that requires a long-term effort.

King is of course one of the most prolific novelists in history and his works have been adapted into film so often he’s almost a film genre in and of himself. You might assume (as I did) that someone so insanely productive must have worked insane hours. In fact, he only actually works about two or three hours a day. How, one might wonder, is this possible?

King doesn’t put in long hours. What King does, however, is first of all show up daily, consistently (five or six days a week)

Because the second thing that he does is focus on getting something done. King doesn’t have work hours, exactly, instead, he has a quota of 2,000 words a day. Some writers advise setting aside time for writing: sit down with a cup of coffee, for one hour a day, whether you type one chapter, one paragraph, or one word, the important thing is you’re there, right? Well not really. Because you’ve just wasted an hour, probably didn’t even really enjoy the coffee, and left with a guilty feeling even though you honored your “commitment”. You might sit for even two or three hours, or a whole day, but if you still didn’t do much, it would only make you feel worse.

On the other hand, if you’re aiming for a target, and you have a good day and bang out 2,000 words in an hour, you can take off early. You can feel really good, even proud of what you did. And you’ve got the rest of your day to yourself. The key thing is to focus on moving the project forward each day, not being busy for the sake of being busy, but to ensure each day's work gets you a little closer to the finish line.

If you do this, consistently, it's amazing what you can accomplish. Show up every day, shovel a little earth, and you can move mountains. Working in this way, at two thousand words a day, King would carve out the rough draft of a 100,000-word novel in 50 days. Ten weeks. Two and a half months.

This is how we would fish halibut, when I worked on the boats in Kodiak. We didn’t have work hours. We had a certain number of tubs of longline gear we had to run every day. We had to chop bait for and then bait sixty tubs, set out sixty tubs, haul sixty tubs, gut every fish that came onboard. We did this every day. Hook by hook, tub by tub, miles by mile of line, fish by fish. We did this until we had 100,000 pounds of halibut. And if you worked faster, you’d get through the tubs faster, and could take a break, watch a movie or sleep or eat ice cream in the galley. Applying this mentality to science helps, I believe.

Another key element of King's philosophy is to think of yourself as a craftsman, not an artist. For example, Writer’s Block.

Have you ever had Writer’s Block?

No you haven’t. It doesn’t exist. Stephen King does not believe in Writer’s Block.

And you may or may not love his novels but he’s written and sold a lot more than you have, so who are you to argue with his opinion on the subject?

Consider:

Craftsmen don't get creative block. You don't call up the plumber and he looks at the flooded bathroom and says, "Sorry, not today. I have Plumber's Block." You’d fire him, and get another plumber. You’re not asking for a genius, just someone who knows how to use a wrench and pipe fittings. You wouldn’t put up with this nonsense.

Likewise, the carpenter doesn't look at the hole in your roof and shake his head and say, "my muse isn't speaking to me." He understands his tools, and he knows how to use them. He shows up, he gets it done.

The same, King argues, is true of writing.

Think of yourself as a workman, like a carpenter, a plumber, an ironworker. Instead of working with pipes, or two-by fours, or steel I-beams, you work with words. Letters are assembled into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, paragraphs into chapters, chapters into books. There are techniques that consistently work- metaphors and similes and foreshadowing- and others that don’t, like adverbs (adverbs are bad, King writes passionately). Know the materials, know the tools, know the techniques.

Oddly, this dutiful approach frees you up to be more creative, because when you show up every day, instead of waiting for the muse, that's when the muse appears. When you’re not focused on being a genius, just lower the bar to the level of doing something, good or bad, you’re far freer to do something. By lowering the threshold — just two thousand words of anything, rather than a single beautiful phrase— you’re opening yourself up to take risks, and chances. So the muse, that great idea or beautiful phrase, that solution, becomes more likely to appear.

Of course, when you approach work this way, the work you produce may be bad. It may not be a work of genius. But it’s very rare that anyone produces a work of genius on the first try. But that’s why we have word processors. That’s why we do editing. Bad first drafts become okay second drafts, become great third drafts, beautiful fourth drafts… but you cannot edit a blank page.

You have to create something to have something you can edit.

And even if this philosophy produces a lot of bad writing, even if not all those first drafts are salvageable, when you show up every day, you get better, you learn to work with words and sentences, how to think. You develop your skills, and creativity is perhaps a kind of skill… so again the muse is more likely to show up.

Last, my own addition to this philosophy— you need to focus on finishing projects. My catchphrase these days is, "I don't write papers... I finish them." It sounds kind of badass, but it’s more aspirational than descriptive, more a nagging reminder to myself to finish projects, than a boast.

Papers that are endlessly in the process of being written up, year after year, are of no use to anyone. Better have a good, competent paper with a few rough edges out in six months or a year, than a perfect work in five or ten years.

Perfectionism isn’t a good quality. The perfect is the enemy of the good. And even if you want to do something that’s great, rather than merely good, perfection is still your enemy, because no great work is ever perfect. Perfectionism is more often about rumination, refusal to make decisions, and unrealistic expectations, than high standards. Nothing you or anyone else will ever produce is perfect, and eventually you just have to make peace with what you’ve produced and decide it’s good enough.

Steve Jobs' take on this was "real artists ship." A focus on working rather than finishing seems to derail a lot of people (I have often fallen into this trap). It’s common for someone to tell you about an amazing paper they’re working on, and you ask about it a year later, two years, five years later, and they’re still working on it. The problem is they’re constantly working on the paper… but they’re never finishing it.