Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms, and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."

King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote.

Will the real Stephen King stand up?

This was money well spent. This book is more than the title implies. First it is a selected biography of Stephen King. I enjoyed the poison ivy episode. This is not a deviation but an explanation of why he writes the way he does and the background that he draws on. Secondly this is a "how to write like Stephen King" book it reflects his likes and dislikes. I agree with most of them. I suppose that that is why I like his novels.

However I can only guess that he must spend a lot of time around people that cuss. It is not like he is not aware of it. I feel that he is somewhat proud of the fact that he cusses a lot. Luckily he said it is not necessity to be excessive.

I share his dislike for flashbacks. And he also expresses several dislikes for other stilting crutches, including excessive description of Back-story.
An added bonus is his description of the van accident that a certain comedian commented about saying that Stephen lost his Tommyknockers. Stephen forgot to mention that he bought the van that hit him for destruction purposes. Talk about revenge.

Over all after reading this I was compelled to try my hand at writing.

One man's treasure is another man's junk

About the only thing in common between King and myself is our first name. Other than that, our views on writing (based on those expressed in this book) could be worlds apart.

It's not necessarily true that I disagree with the points he raised. Just that writing is such an individual undertaking that no hard-and-fast rule can ever hold true. And King imposes several such rules in his book.

An example is King's insistence on the use of adverbs in dialogue attribution "only in the rarest and most special of occasions". This may actually compromise a writer's individual style. The point here is that not everybody aspires to be a good dialogue writer. Imagine populating a 30-page dialogue with purely "he/she said".

While many of his advice are spot-on indeed, you can't help but wonder if it makes sense to follow them. After all, not everybody wants to write fiction. And certainly not everybody wants to write fiction the way King does.

For instance, King harbours a deep distrust for plot. Instead, he prefers to start with a situation and mould the character from there. This approach may not work for writers whose strength lies elsewhere.

True, the story should always be the boss. But if your characters were shallow, readers would have a hard time developing a sense of association. And if readers cannot associate with the character, think of how they would feel about the story itself.

Part of the problem with "On Writing" is that you need to be familiar with King's work in order to understand the points he's driving at. I wouldn't consider this approach as a shameless plug on the part of the author, but it does make it more difficult for non-fans to align themselves to his ideas.

All in all, "On Writing" is a good read if you want to gain insight into the thought processes of one of the most successful fiction writers of our times. But if you follow the tips to a T, you may end up as another Stephen King, which may not exactly be a good thing.

The most inspiring book on writing

Quite simply, this is the most inspiring book on the writing craft that you will ever read. First, because Stephen King gives you a glimpse into the early stages of his career as a writer, when he struggled as hard as anyone to get something published. He is brutally candid about the shortcomings of his early work, yet clear about how much he loved to write and the sheer volume of writing necessary to improve.

And second, because he gives you an honest description of his method of approaching a story. But he does so not in a pedantic, academic way but rather with the storytelling magic for which he's become so famous. It's the most entertaining look at the writer's craft that you're ever likely to read.

Buy it to learn about the craft. Buy it to simply enjoy. It's as much fun to read as his novels.