On Writing

I highly recommend Stephen King's book, On Writing, to anyone with dreams of becoming an author. It's informative, funny, inspiring, and realistic. One passage made me laugh so hard that I reread it a couple of times and then shared it on my sister site http://greek4cheerful.wordpress.com/ a year ago. While browsing through old posts over the weekend I came across it and thought it would be the perfect addition to my writers blog.

Here's the set up:

King is giving his opinion on the importance of writing seminars and retreats, which he certainly doesn't favor as being important in the life of a writer. This is what he had to say about the critiquing sessions.

"And what about those 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 might say. It had something... a sense of I don't know... there's a loving kind of you know... I can't exactly explain it...

Other writing-seminar gemmies include I felt like the tone thing was just kind of you know; The character of Polly seemed pretty much stereotypical; I loved the imagery because I could see what he was talking about more or less perfectly.

And, instead of pelting these babbling idiots with their own freshly toasted marshmallows, everyone else sitting around the fire is often nodding and smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful. In too many cases the teacher and writers in residence are nodding, smiling and looking solemnly thoughtful right along with them. 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."