How to Write Real Good Words, According to Stephen King

And some other interesting books this summer

Holy schmack is it a hot summer here in Taiwan. Regular days of 35°C.

(In American, that’s the rough equivalent of tying 95 rat tails together in a classic Rat King formation and measuring the temperature at the center point—just FYI.)

The humidity flows from around 60% mid-day all the way to 90%+ at night.

I like to walk a lot and I’m on the angrier end of the scale the last few years — it makes for a fun sweaty time.

Well hello there yourself, Accuweather.

It’s a regular site; this big white lao wai roaming the streets of Taiwan covered in a personal raincloud listening to podcasts and getting angry at traffic.

But with the heat, out comes my natural proclivities — turtling indoors with the AC cranked.

And what should a turtle who hasn’t written anything fun in a few months do while enjoying the cool comforts of modern humanity?

Start reading again, of course!

Blame my millennialism, my laziness, or my phone addiction, whatever it is, reading in my adult life is a habit made, no longer a passion. But on that note, it’s been a successful summer.

In early July I cruised around Singapore meeting some old friends then hopped over to a resort in the Philippines to remote-work for a couple weeks.

First time I’ve done that since before COVID.

Oops.

I honestly forgot how a person can be super productive while having a few daily brews and swims and Asianized western food. I guess that’s just good ol’ YOLO, as the kids might say.

A nice part of this little break from reality; I dragged out the ol’ Kindle and went to town.

I burned through the first Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, what fantastical writing! I finished it in two days, had fantasies of writing my own take on it, and then found out there were 4 more to burn through on another day.

A "trilogy of five books" as it mentioned somewhere in the book.

I miss that kind of humor. It just rattles my ruckles the right way.

Hitchhiker’s Guide commemorative edition scanned copy, Douglas Adams, Pan Books, CC Fair Use

But hot damn, that is one ugly book cover. Then again, it sold 250,000 copies in the first three months. Perhaps modern authors have lost their way.

In that spirit, I chose a deliciously ugly purple and yellow for my recent book:

This art style took us so long to make…

I did not sell 250,000 copies.

Next up in the books was Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy of the Ogilvy advertising agency. He’s known as the “Father of Advertising” and was quite fond of his last name.

One of my main clients for the last year is this awesome little language app startup for kids where I’ve moved into a bit of a mixed role somewhere between marketing lead, SEO-er, and copywriter.

It suits me. I like tackling 1,000 projects at once. Really wrackles the ruckles.

It had been a while since I tackled marketing for an actual company though, so why not freshen up on some related material?

Ogilvy on Advertising was a pretty decent read. It came out in 1983 when the author was 62, so the language is a bit spicy at times, but I found the substance to be quite useful.

And as — largely thanks to him — advertising is kind of a greasy scope into the human soul, it was fascinating to see what fundamental truths of ‘how to sell things’ stayed true even today.

If you find yourself in any form of advertising or selling today, highly recommended to at least see his rules.

Then came a long overdue booklist item - Stephen King’s On Writing.

Which title do you prefer?

To be honest, I can’t recall reading many of his books. Perhaps I burned through a few in high school but I’ve almost exclusively read non-fiction as an adult.

That said, he’s obviously one of the modern greats.

What I didn’t find too great was slugging through the first half of his book until reaching any actual writing advice.

Never skip setting the scene, I suppose. It was only later I paid closer attention to the full title:

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Oops.

Anyway, halfway through the book the big hitters started flying out, interspersed with stories and opinions and examples to learn from. Nothing was too shocking. He mainly kept emphasizing a point that makes complete sense:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

As someone who’s been pretty slacking on both of those things this past year, well, you might be able to tell my linguisticky skills are a bit too stuck together for the moment.

It was also a bit surprising to hear him talk about how he doesn’t really outline his entire books before creating them. Rather, he believes storytelling should be an organic process instead of a rigid, pre-planned structure, allowing a story to naturally play out based more on the characters themselves rather than a plotline.

I like that.

It’s right up the alley of where these essays come from.

A nugget, a thought scribbled down, a few days (or weeks or months) to ponder over it, then an outburst of wordage on a screen and hopefully, for your sake, reader, a nice hour of editing another day before sending it out.

He also had a bunch of other good advice, but these ones kind of stuck out to me:

• Make a daily writing routine — old advice but probably one of the biggest ROIs

• Second draft = First draft - 10% — right up there with ‘kill your darlings’, hard to do but its the difference between a cardboard sandwich and a Big Mac. They both still taste the same, but we like eating one of them (for some reason).

• Write what you know (about) — He advocates to not get too bogged down in research (haha — good luck, fellow nonfictioners) and to just write in place what you’d like to appear there then do more research later during revision, if needed.

• Use the active voice — again, old advice (maybe it came from him?), but one I struggle with a lot. Or used to anyway. Passive voice was just so much easier…things just happened to me, you know?

There’s lots more of good stuff in the book and I’d recommend reading it if you write these little characters on your screen. Feel free to skip the first half though, and damn, he wrote not one but two epilogues! If you’re in it for the advice, those are more memoir than anything else at that point.

Oh, and he called Ayn Rand’s writing overly didactic and that it was more of a vehicle for Rand's philosophy than a compelling narrative.

As I’m listening to Atlas Shrugged — slowly, ever so slowly — I can’t agree more. I set out to consume the neo-liberal economics bible just to see what all the fuss is about.

And I still have no idea wtf people found interesting about it.

Anyway, I’ll be sure to report back on that whenever I can finish the 561,996 words of fictional dictionary-like conservative extremist wet dream dialogue.

If I can manage to stay awake for 36 more hours, that is.

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Written by a finally-writing-something-again JJ Pryor.