By: Glenn Leibowitz
…
Here are eight writing strategies King shares
that have helped him sell 350 million books:
1. Tell the truth.
"Now comes the big question: What are you
going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.
Anything at all... as long as you tell the truth... Write what you like, then
imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal
knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work... What you know
makes you unique in some other way. Be brave."
2. Don't use big words when small ones work.
"One of the really bad things you can do to
your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because
you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up
your household pet in evening clothes."
3. Use single-sentence paragraphs.
"The object of fiction isn't grammatical
correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story... to make
him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.
The single-sentence paragraph more closely
resembles talk than writing, and that's good. Writing is seduction. Good talk is
part of seduction. If not so, why do so many couples who start the evening at
dinner wind up in bed?"
4. Write for your Ideal Reader.
"Someone -- I can't remember who, for the
life of me -- once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person.
As it happens, I believe this.
I think that every novelist has a single ideal
reader; that at various points during the composition of a story, the writer is
thinking, 'I wonder what he/she will think when he/she reads this part?' For me
that first reader is my wife, Tabitha... Call that one person you write for
Ideal Reader."
5. Read a lot.
. . .
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~*~
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