What does this mean ?
It means authors recommend what works for them, not necessarily what will work for anyone.
And the last panel just tells you to use cocaine, unrelated.
Stephen King has entered the chat
Not unrelated
Or very related
If you want to write effectively, you need to sit by a cafe window and look out at the street while it’s raining. If someone asks you what your book is about, sigh heavily, then say that it’s a think piece about furries in space.
Aren’t all furries in space time already?
Do a barrel roll!
You’re becoming more like your father!
Ow wow she got to meet Stephen King?
I cannot recommend Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing” enough!
It’s a great collection of essay’s about creativity and writing that never fails to light a fire under my ass and get me out making things.
Use Vim?
Instruction unclear - trapped in Vim.
:q
:q!
Statistics don’t lie, go for the cocaine!
Writing one line at a time
There are authors who have a plot beforehand and there are authors who are as exited while writing as readers afterwards. Both ways can work when executed well.
Garden style can work really well when for creativity, but there’s part of my brain that remembers winds of winter probably isn’t ever coming out, and I feel sad.
I don’t know what garden style is, neither do I know Winds of Winter but I read in an afterword that Ursula K Le Guin couldn’t stop writing because she was so curious to find out what happens to Ged
That’s pretty much it, instead of having everything planned out ahead of time you just kind of let it flow, growing like a garden. It helps because sometimes preplanning can be a bit restrictive, you tend to get more varied responses by garden style instead.
Winds of winter is the next book in the “a song of ice and Fire” series. It’s been well over a decade since the last book. The fan consensus is that, amongst other reasons, he hasn’t finished it because in the last few books he let the story grow wildly out of scope, and is having huge difficulties resolving everything in a satisfying matter. Hence my caution on the style.
Never outline. Just wing it, let it rest for a while (days, weeks, month) and then read it again. That last piece of advise is also from Stephen King. I believe from the newer preface of the Dark Tower series.
He also provided the “use cocaine” advice.
There are only a couple pieces of writing advice I see people consistently agree on:
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Write something consistently, even when you don’t want to. If you’re a full time writer, that might be at least one page a day. If it’s just a hobby, it could be less. The important thing is to keep what you are writing somewhere in your head to keep the creative juices flowing eventually.
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Read. Read good books/stories to give you an idea of what to do and what’s been done when writing. Read mediocre or even bad books/stories to give you an idea of what not to do and what’s been overdone in writing.
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Learn about or experience some stuff to help spark ideas for writing.
To point 3, I heard some author point out, and I think it makes a lot of sense, that reading bad writing can maybe tell you what not to do, but there’s so much good writing out there, more than you could read in a lifetime, that it just doesn’t make sense not to read all the best books. If you read in a world of excellent writing your standards are that high and you can still take lessons from the worst of the best.
- Maybe 3a. If you can afford, go someplace new and see if the new environment, new food, new people, if it sparks something in you. Best cure for a writing rut is a new rut
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I outline, then I write, then I update the outline, then I write. Then I ignore the outline.
But when do you do the cocaine?
Somewhere after drinking to oblivion and shortly before the looming deadline
“Yes.”
-Stephen King
How much cocaine?
Also yes.
Cocaine gets recommended to writers / creatives all the time because (in my experience) cocaine makes it easier to write without editing / criticizing in real time. Your internal critic just gets overwhelmed by your internal cheerleader telling you everything you’re doing is awesome and it makes it much easier to just get something onto the page. It is possible to learn how to do this much more economically without cocaine, but a lot of writers who start using cocaine never figure out how to do that part without it. And there’s the whole addiction thing that makes writing a lot harder the longer you use it. Really tough to try to be creative when you’re jonesing.
Your internal critic just gets overwhelmed by your internal cheerleader telling you everything you’re doing is awesome and it makes it much easier to just get something onto the page.
The only way I was able to finish my final paper in college was adderal + weed + booze. I used to be completely unable to write anything because the internal critic.
Now, I do 5 minute free writes on paper. Set a timer, no corrections, do not stop writing until the timer goes off, reword the sentence you just wrote if you can’t think of anything else.
Also weed still. Weed lets me write and write, and write…
This is how you end up writing about kids running a train on a girl to escape from an evil clown with a balloon.
His internal editor screamed “no they were supposed to be playing with model trains. Like weird 55 year olds. Or cool 55 year olds who get way too into it so their sets are badass. It’s a sign of them turning into weird slash cool 55 year old men look I like model trains” and instead we got, well, Cocaine Stephen
Cocaine is the least useful substance in the creative substance (or so I’m told). Good old legal marijuana (thank you Trudeau), is probably the best all round, and if you use a typewriter, you might find you start typing to a rhythm.
The outline is like a scaffold for a building. Very helpful early on, but if it’s still standing when you’re done, you’ve done it wrong
I think as long as you’re constantly rewritting you’re moving in the right direction.
However sometimes it’s better to put it down for a while and go to something else. Just like with anything, you can get burned out and fixated on details, redoing things over and over in a circle.
Patrick Rothfuss confirmed greatest author of our age
As a writer, yes.
This is all good advice
Stephen King’s book On Writing is a pretty good resource for advice for aspiring writers.
For the high level points, writers should write. A lot. That’s his biggest piece of advice.
Writers should also try to “expand their toolbox”, meaning they should be able to use different methods. Just keep practicing writing with the tools you have and the techniques and tools you discover. Eventually, you’ll find what works for you. You can’t just expect to use a tool proficiently without practice. But everybody is different, so in the case of outlining, for example, if you practice with it and it just doesn’t work, then you’ll eventually know that it won’t work for you.
The last big point is to develop writing habits. Like, follow a specific daily schedule. Write a certain number of words each day.
I love to write but I also love doing lots of things so I only end up just writing verbose internet comments sporadically instead.
Sometimes I don’t even have time to
Time to…what? Sell me your book?! I’m a publisher, sell me your book! Sell me- gah, just missed him.
Wait really? Because I have a half finished book I’ve never had the heart to finish because that style of book has gone out of style
It’s a bathroom reader about bathrooms. I have STORIES. Everyone has phones now
I remember a coffee table book about coffee tables that did pretty damn well, make it!
The secret to how King achieved those three objectives (especially the first one)…? Cocaine!
IIRC, in On Writing, the bad habit he spends most of his time talking about is his drinking. And he claimed that when they took his booze away, he started drinking mouthwash. He was so blackout drunk for so long that he doesn’t remember writing one of his books. I think it was Cujo.
This also applies to art.
