Yesterday I finished reading Stephen King’s On Writing. Part memoir, part explication of craft, and fully entertaining. Also a strange choice for a first Stephen King book to read.

I’ve never read a Stephen King novel before. Nor have I seen a movie based on his work. I only know of his prolific oeuvre to the extent that it has permeated pop culture, which, to his credit, is nonzero. (That’s a high bar to scale; most authors toil away for years without making any impression on the average reader, to say nothing of the average nonreader. When your reputation precedes you, that’s when you know you’ve got it made, baby.) Carrie is high school girls, bullying, telekinesis, and pig’s blood. The Shining is the Overlook Hotel. It is Pennywise the Clown. That’s the extent of my Stephen King knowledge coming into this book. I am, in short, a total newbie.

I picked up On Writing in a downtown San Jose bookstore (or was it Campbell?) in October. That same day I also bought Code Girls, Last Night in Montreal, and, most relevant to our discussion, Stephen King’s 2011 alternate-history doorstopper 11/22/63. I could have read 11/22/63 before On Writing, to see his craft in action before his commentary. In fact, a few friends advised that if I’m aiming for maximum enjoyment, that might be the better approach.

Why did I choose to read On Writing first? Mere curiosity, that’s all. I think that being a total newbie presented me with a unique opportunity. When I read Stephen Sondheim’s lyric-books in December, I was already familiar with a fair body of his work. Now I was curious to know what it would be like to see an author of similar renown explain his craft with otherwise a minimal awareness of his work.

(Also: with The Elements of Eloquence, Dreyer’s English, and now On Writing, I’m on a prosecraft spree!)

A few bits that stuck with me the first time around.

Situation drives plot, not the other way around. Stephen King plots minimally. Instead he dreams up a situation and lets the characters figure it out organically. Half the time he doesn’t know where the scene will finish. If like a keyframe animator you try to keep the scene hewn to the beats you’ve plotted beforehand, you lose something. The only thing you need for this to work is to be true to the characters.

How do you end up with tightly plotted novels? You don’t, at least not in the first draft. The first draft is the closed-door draft, for narrative exploration completely unbridled, where you write for nobody but yourself. The second draft is all about noticing connections and themes, and then revising, excising, and moving sections around to bring out the themes. Though there may be more drafts for polish, the second draft is where you begin to open the door to outside eyes.

(Aside: I have deeply imprinted on the structural virtuosity of Emily St. John Mandel’s novels. I wonder if this is also how she does it, or if she’s a heavy plotter.)

Stephen King posits that you write for an Ideal Reader of your own selection. Who are you writing for? Who do you imagine turning your pages, and where do you envision her gasping, or her full-bellied laughing, or her heartbeat quickening? And which sections might bore her? You’ll want to cut down on those. His Ideal Reader is his wife, novelist Tabitha King. He knows what she looks for, he knows her reading habits, preferences, and quirks. Other trusted friends may have their own opinions on his drafts, but when their feedbacks disagree, Tabitha is the tiebreaker.

Who is mine? I think I am still at the stage where it’s myself. It’s going to take a lot of development and courage to externalise my Ideal Reader. For now, I write these essays strictly for myself—they’re closed-door drafts, unpolished. If I want to develop my writing finesse further, I recognise that I’ll have to start to write second drafts, open-door drafts. That is scary. I wonder which of the first drafts in this document are the most promising candidates for the second-draft treatment. I don’t know if I want to do that yet. For now I will content myself with accumulating a mountain of first drafts.

But, as my friend noted last week in the context of me pondering merging onto a highway for the first time, even thinking about it is the first step.

Another short bit. Stephen King writes, “I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction” (p. 145). Really? You’re a slow reader? Last year I read a mere twenty books, and I even thought that was impressive.