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Writing Like Stephen

The Statistics

  • Writing Period: March 9 - 22

  • Words: 6,239

  • Hemingway Editor:

    • ​Adverbs Used: 31

    • Phrases with Passive Voice: 44

  • Words/Hour: 542.5 (~11.5 hours)

  • Words/Day: 1,559.8 (4 days)

  • Cups of Coffee Consumed: ~6

  • Alcoholic beverages consumed while writing: 2

The Writer: Stephen King (1947-)

— American horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy writer

— Born in Portland, Maine

Quote-worthy: "And what about those [writers' workshop] critiques, by the way? How valuable are they? Not very, in my experience, sorry. A lot of them are maddeningly vague. I love the feeling of Peter's story, someone may say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly describe it... It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class."

Famous Works

  • The Shining (1977)

  • It (1986)

  • Misery (1987)

  • A boatload of other novels & short stories

 

Writing Style

  • No adverbs, especially not after “he said” and “she said”

  • Pay no attention to perfecting grammar

  • Concrete and specific language, especially in description (i.e. it is a Pepsi, not a soda)

 

Writing Routine

  • Close yourself off in a room with no distractions: no TV, no phone, no video games; shut the door and close the shades

  • Write the first draft as if it is only for you, be as crazy as you want to be

  • Writing 1000-2000 words a day; first draft completed in three months’ time

  • The morning is for writing; don’t leave the room until you’ve hit your daily word goal

  • The evening is for revision

 

Writing Advice

  • If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time, or the necessary tools, to write

  • Leave out the boring stuff and kill your darlings

  • Remember that writing happens one word at a time, regardless of the length of your project

  • The passive voice, like the adverb, was created for the timid writer (e.g. use “The meeting is at 7” and not “The meeting will be held at 7”)

  • The paragraph is the true unit of the novel and each paragraph’s structure regulates the way the novel breathes, whether a section is short and choppy (as in the one-word graf) or long-winded and dense (as in the sixteen-page graf that appears in one writer’s book)

  • Outrun your self-doubt by writing rapidly

 

Sources

The Reflection

Unlike Stephen, I didn’t have a basement room with a desk beneath an eave to close myself off in. What I did have was a laundry room with a rather limited amount of foot traffic, especially after the midnight hour. My apartment’s Wi-Fi signal definitely did not reach the laundry room and there was little else there to distract me — though my phone still got in the way sometimes.

 

Besides closing myself off from distraction, the main thing I tried to do while emulating Stephen was to reach a consistent word goal. I set this at 1,000 words per writing session, partly due to Stephen’s recommendations and partly because I was behind on the novella. In four of my five writing sessions, I was successful in reaching the goal. After that, the laundry room seemed to be losing the creative spark it once supplied me with and I decided it was time to move on to a new spot and a new writer.

 

I tried to be specific with language in this section of the novella, which spans from the end of Part II through the beginning of Part IV. (It had been my initial intention to divide the parts by author, but the novella had other plans.) I don’t know that I got too carried away with breaking grammar rules or anything, but I followed Stephen’s advice in not worrying about perfecting the grammar.

 

In terms of passive voice, I tried to keep myself from doing it, but I am positive it shows up in some places; I feel like it is difficult to identify sometimes. The same goes for adverbs: I was vigilant about their use. As with the other writers I have emulated in this project so far, I didn’t worry too much about what time of day I was writing. As a college student with numerous responsibilities, my schedule dictated when I could sit down for the most part. And this was usually late at night/early in the morning, as the record will show.

 

I think, when all is said and done, this section of the novella will have been the one in which I had to change the least amount of things in terms of what I would normally do when approaching the writing process.

(End of Part II through Beginning of Part IV)

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