Tag Archives: Craft

STEPHEN KING’S SURPRISINGLY SIMPLE SECRET TO SUCCESS

When it comes to being a master of the commercial writing craft, few authors are more successful than Stephen King. The “Horror Guy”, who King calls himself, has tirelessly worked for over sixty years. He’s produced more than fifty novels and countless other pieces in a non-stop career during which he almost died from substance abuse and a nasty vehicle accident. “Prolific” is an understatement when it comes to labeling this writing machine, and there’s a surprisingly simple secret to Stephen King’s success.

Yes, the secret to Stephen King’s success is surprisingly simple. It’s a concoction beyond natural storytelling talent, which he has in spades. It’s a mix beyond craft knowledge and prose perfection. And it’s a blend beyond something else—something most writers simply won’t do in their lives. Yet it’s a simple success secret which Stephen King slyly shares if you follow his work.

Before I disclose Stephen King’s s simple success secret, let me tell you what triggered this post. I’m a big Stephen King fan. I’ve read a lot of his stuff—From A Buick Eight is my mind-blowing favorite—and I know many readers can’t Stand him (pun intended). Certainly, he’s verbose compared to James Patterson, but I’m on Team King all the way, even though Team Patterson outsells him.

I connected with a lady who recently retired from the same police force I served with. I didn’t know her directly, but I worked with her dad in the RCMP years ago. She made a career as a detective with Vancouver’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team (I-HIT) and was their high-profile spokesperson for a long stint. Now this fine lady has a keen interest in beginning a crime-writing career, and she was silly enough to turn to me for advice.

I see piles of potential in this unfolding writer. She has the proper package required to be a commercial success and a household name in crime fiction circles, just as she was in the true crime world. Part of our long talk was me recommending resources to study. Stephen King’s On Writing—A Memoir of the Craft was at the top of the list.

Stephen King. Where do you start to explain his success secret? First, Stephen King is self-made. He didn’t come from writing royalty, and that story of him working nights at a laundry and throwing Carrie in the trash isn’t bullshit. His wife, Tabitha, rescued the manuscript and submitted it to Putnam and the success of Stephen King—writer—began.

Stephen King is coming on to 74. He still writes every day that he can and that includes Christmas and his birthday. Mr. King still finds time to read—lots of reading time—and he generously gives what he has to spare in helping others to develop their writing skills. That includes unfolding writers like my retired detective friend who I hope has redlined, yellow highlighted, and made black ink notes in an On Writing copy as I have.

In prepping this post, I reread On Writing. Or, I should say reviewed my red lines and yellow bars along with black ink notations. I’ve paged this prize at least a dozen times as I’ve built my skills, and I’m now at the point that I can legitimately call myself a commercial writer who’s achieved international bestselling status.

Call me a bragger. Just don’t call me a bullshitter, and I attribute my achievements much to Stephen King’s simple success secret which I’ll keep you in suspense from while I do a quick review of what’s in On Writing and why these pages of gold are so, so valuable for anyone who wants to make it in the commercial storytelling world.

Mr. King wrote On Writing in 2000. At least that’s what the copyright page says. That would have made him around 52 which is 11 years younger than I was when I decided to take writing stories seriously.

On Writing opens with this quote in the foreword: “What follows is an attempt to put down, briefly and simply, how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

It’s about the day job and it’s about the language. Commercial writing is a job. It’s bloody hard work that requires a writer to show up every day, sit down with their ass in the chair, and put their fingers on the keys—not just when they feel like it or when they think the muse calls. And it’s about using those keys to transcribe language into a crafted story that’s saleable to a mass market.

Like Stephen King has been doing tirelessly every day for 60 years.

This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.

On Writing is a short book by Stephen King standards. It runs just shy of 300 pages, but those pages contain sage quotes like these:

You must not come lightly to the blank page.”

It’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close this book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”

Simple sentences worked well for Hemmingway, didn’t they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.”

I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Good writing is about letting go of fear and affectation. Also about making good choices about the tools you plan to work with.”

I love this job. I want you to love it, too. But if you don’t want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well—settle back into complacency and be grateful you have even that much to fall back on. There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust over your typewriter or computer. He lives underground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get from mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn the midnight oil because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others. Read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mindset, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or your word processor.”

A radio host once asked me how I write. I answered ‘one word at a time’. Day in and day out. Not surprisingly, it’s that simple. It’s the secret to my success.”

In my humble opinion (IMHO), Stephen King’s surprisingly simple secret to his success as a commercial writer is tirelessness. He’s tirelessly written one word at a time for over six decades and shows no sign of letting up. Long live the King.

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Post note from Garry: There is a book karma god or some kinda benevolent page muse out there. I published this piece on Saturday, 20Feb2021 and on Sunday, 21Feb2021, I went into a used bookstore in Parksville on Vancouver Island. What did I find? A first edition, hardcover of On Writing in pristine condition. SCORE! Start the f’n car! Even the dust jacket had no fading or marks. I’m going to have this baby framed in a shadow box.

HOW TO START WRITING A NOVEL – WITH RACHEL ABBOTT

Rachel Abbott is psychological thriller writer who has sold over a million novels. Rachel generously shares her views on novel writing with DyingWords followers with this abridged piece which has been republished from her website, Rachel-Abbott.com.

A1The world is full of people who really want to write. For some, it’s a burning ambition. They dream about days of sitting in front of their computer (or even more whimsically, in their attic – with pencil and notebook), having great ideas and getting them all down on paper.

Some of it is like that. It’s exciting seeing your ideas grow and develop and watching the words appear on the page – sometimes it’s as if your sub-conscious has taken over and when you read back your latest chapter you think “where the hell did THAT come from?”. It’s a wonderful experience.

With the growth of self-publishing and the ease with which any writer can publish their work, that dream can become a reality.

But where do you start?

A2I’m sure that everybody writes in a different way. Some people say that they start with the title. Others say they just sit down and write and see what comes out. So I’m just going to talk about what I do – not because it’s the right way, but just because it’s the only way I know.

I start with a question.

In Only the Innocent the question was “What set of circumstances would be so bad that a woman would have absolutely no other option than to kill a man?

A4It had to be a scenario from which she couldn’t escape. But initially each avenue that I pursued left me with a “but she could do this or that” and it took a long time to work out what would make me kill a man. And for me, that’s the way it has to be. I have to think how I would behave, and not just one of my imagined characters.

For The Back Road I thought about a group of people, each with a secret that they need to hide.

The secrets had to be credible – secrets that you might encounter amongst your own friends. Or at least, the majority of them had to be. Perhaps in one case the secret is darker than the rest. Then I asked myself what kind of catalyst would it take to blow everything apart and expose the lies and deceit, and what would be the outcome. I have been to dinner parties or business dinners and seen looks exchanged between people and thought “I wonder what that’s all about?” knowing that I would probably never find out. To me, that dinner party is real.

That is always my starting position – what is the overall issue that the protagonist has to solve.

A22Then comes the incubation time. Once the initial idea is in my head, I start to carry round a notebook and pencil, and each time I have an idea that develops a character or plot point, I jot it down. There are always plenty of false starts – storylines that I begin to develop and then discard. I think that’s fairly normal (at least, I hope so).

Once I have a rough idea of the beginning – the inciting incident (the conflict that begins the action of the story and causes the protagonist to act) – and the end – how the protagonist solves (or doesn’t) the problem – I switch tack. I start to develop my characters, locations and timelines.

For each character, I find a photograph that matches my idea of how they might look.

A9It may be a picture of a famous person, or it might be a random person that I find in images on the Internet. It doesn’t matter. I grab their photo and put it into their character file. Then I begin to develop their characteristics – Age, date of birth, personality, likes, dislikes, greatest strengths and weaknesses, story goal, past traumas – a whole list of details which gives me a very clear idea of who they are and how they would behave. It also means that I know how to describe them, and because it’s all written down, I can always remember how old they are, what they drink, what secrets they have, what job they do.

Next come the locations.

I was recently interviewed for a blog, and the interviewer very kindly said “I find the atmosphere of place very strong in your novels.  I know those villages – I’ve met those people.  How do you get that atmosphere?

A3The answer is that I also know these places – because I have found photographs of interiors and exteriors of all the houses or other locations that are featured. In The Back Road I used Google street view to walk around the Cheshire village that I used as my main location, and found the perfect property for my protagonist. I was inspired by an atrium dining room that I saw on an architectural site, and grabbed that image too. I found a map and worked out which road would be “The Back Road” and then plotted where everybody lived. Only that way could I be sure that journeys were logical. Even at the dinner party, I wrote down the menu and a seating plan. It was important to know where everybody was sitting, so that I knew when people had to lean forward to speak across somebody, or when people’s eyes could meet.

Timelines are really important – and not just the timeline of the book.

A14Most people have a back-story – when did they meet? What are the major events in their lives? The back-story timeline is really important, because I have often read books in which a section has made me stop and think, “How old is this person? Does this make sense?” and anything that slows a reader down is bad news. If you are confident because you have the information in front of you, the reader will feel that confidence.In short, then, I need to know every detail so that when I write about a location or a person I have a very clear vision of them in my mind. In The Back Road, if I had any artistic skills, I could paint you a picture of every room in the house, and how the rooms connect with each other. It’s as clear in my head as my own home, and allows me to write with confidence.

Of course, the important thing is the story!

A16As you will have gathered, I am a fanatical planner, and I use two different pieces of software for my planning. My main tool is a piece of software called Scrivener. This has some fantastic features that I will talk about briefly here, but hope to do a more detailed blog post soon. However, it doesn’t do one thing that I need, and that’s to create the equivalent of a story flowchart. For that – and the initial planning stages – I use Storylines.

With Storylines I can either create a number of story threads, or character threads, and I can see them all at the same time on a cork board using individual ‘cards’. The board is arranged in columns for scenes and rows for character or plot threads. I can move these around and see all on one screen how the story develops and how and when characters appear in the story. It gives me the main outline of my book, and the software does so much more than this. You can write your whole book using nothing else, but there are some elements of Scrivener that I prefer for the writing process.

A5With Scrivener I create folders for each chapter, and then write scenes within a chapter. I can colour code scenes – for example, in The Back Road I coded scenes in relation to the level of tension. I could see when there were spots in which the tension dropped, and it gave me an opportunity to think about the scenes and how to ramp them up a notch.

Similarly, I used keywords extensively. The Back Road has a number of story threads, with huge potential to get lost! So each scene is given one of a number of keywords each of which relates to a thread. I can then search on the keywords, and find all the scenes, allowing me to read one storyline in complete isolation – a fantastic tool for checking consistency and story development. Scenes can be written in any order – once the structure is in place you can add a scene, move it around, put it in an ideas folder for later use – the options are endless. But with the structure in place, the writing can begin.

A8I could talk all day about the tools I use and how they help – but this is supposed to be an overview of how to get started. Remember, I am not for a moment suggesting this is the right way or the only way, but it might give you some ideas of where to start.

*   *   *

A15Rachel Abbott has written four psychological thrillers which, combined, have sold over one million copies. She self-published Only the Innocent in November 2011. It raced up the UK charts to reach the top 100 within 12 weeks and quickly hit the #1 spot in the Amazon Kindle chart (all categories) and remained there for four weeks. 

A10Only the Innocent was so successful that it was re-edited and the new version was launched in the US by Thomas and Mercer in paperback, audio, and Kindle versions on 5th February 2013, hitting the number one spot in the Kindle Store in August 2013. Her second book, The Back Road, was also published by Thomas and Mercer.

Her third book, Sleep Tight, was published in February 2014 and her newest, Stranger Child, was released last month.

A13Rachel Abbott was born just outside Manchester, England. She spent most of her working life as the Managing Director of an interactive media company, developing software and websites for the education market. The sale of that business enabled her to fulfil one of her lifelong ambitions – to buy and restore a property in Italy.

Rachel now lives in Alderney – a beautiful island off the coast of France, and is now able to devote time to her other love – writing fiction. For more information, see Rachel’s website, or follow her on Twitter.

Visit Rachel Abbott’s website at:  www.Rachel-Abbott.com

Like her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RachelAbbott1Writer

Follow Rachel on Twitter:  @_RachelAbbott   https://twitter.com/_RachelAbbott

Buy her books:  http://www.amazon.com/Rachel-Abbott/e/B0068FBVCW