Review: Stephen King On Writing

I think many of us spend time reading writing "instruction" books when we're new to the craft. I've never been a fan of the "do this, not that" sort of writing manual, mainly because the writing rules are so often broken. I'm more of a fan of the more auto-biographical style writing instruction/memoir sort of book.

I only recently read Stephen King's "On Writing". I know, I know. It's sat on my shelf for years, and I just never got to it.  I loved this book because it is first and foremost, hilarious, but secondly, Mr. King explains the various writing "rules" in easy to read language.

As I was reading this book, I realized in the addition of things I still need to work on, there are a lot of things that I'm doing right.

For instance, in the section about description, he talks about how you shouldn't overly describe, and how often, when readers become bored with a book, it's because there's 5 pages of not-needed description.

When I'm reading, I hate descriptions of clothes and only use them when necessary in my own writing. I also don't need a character described to the nth degree. It kind of ruins the story for me, because I like to picture characters my own way.

If I would have read this book several years ago, I think I would have found it all to be "you need to do this, this and that" but now that I'm two years into my writing journey, it was nice to see that I am doing (at least a few things) right!