KING, Stephen - On Writing

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 678.77KB 278 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Visit us on the World Wide Web

http://www.SimonSays.com

or in part in any form.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library

Reference USA, Inc., used under license by

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Set in Garamond No. 3

Library of Congress Publication data is available

King, Stephen, 1947–

On writing : a memoir of the craft / by Stephen King.

p. cm.

1. King, Stephen, 1947– 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. King,

Stephen, 1947—Authorship. 4. Horror tales—Authorship. 5. Authorship. I. Title.

PS3561.I483 Z475 2000

813'.54—dc21 00-030105

[B]

ISBN 0-7432-1153-7

Author’s Note

Unless otherwise attributed, all prose examples, both good and evil,

were composed by the author.

Permissions

by Donovan (Music) Ltd. Administered by Peer International Corporation. Copyright

Granpa Was a Carpenter by John Prine © Walden Music, Inc. (ASCAP).

Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.

Honesty’s the best policy.

—Miguel de Cervantes

Liars prosper.

—Anonymous

First Foreword

In the early nineties (it might have been 1992, but it’s hard to

remember when you’re having a good time) I joined a rock-

and-roll band composed mostly of writers. The Rock Bottom

Remainders were the brainchild of Kathi Kamen Goldmark,

a book publicist and musician from San Francisco. The group

included Dave Barry on lead guitar, Ridley Pearson on bass,

Barbara Kingsolver on keyboards, Robert Fulghum on man-

dolin, and me on rhythm guitar. There was also a trio of

“chick singers,” à la the Dixie Cups, made up (usually) of

Kathi, Tad Bartimus, and Amy Tan.

The group was intended as a one-shot deal—we would

play two shows at the American Booksellers Convention, get

a few laughs, recapture our misspent youth for three or four

hours, then go our separate ways.

It didn’t happen that way, because the group never quite

broke up. We found that we liked playing together too much

to quit, and with a couple of “ringer” musicians on sax and

drums (plus, in the early days, our musical guru, Al Kooper, at

the heart of the group), we sounded pretty good. You’d pay to

hear us. Not a lot, not U2 or E Street Band prices, but maybe

what the oldtimers call “roadhouse money.” We took the

group on tour, wrote a book about it (my wife took the pho-

tos and danced whenever the spirit took her, which was quite

often), and continue to play now and then, sometimes as The

Remainders, sometimes as Raymond Burr’s Legs. The per-

sonnel comes and goes—columnist Mitch Albom has replaced

Barbara on keyboards, and Al doesn’t play with the group any-

more ’cause he and Kathi don’t get along—but the core has

remained Kathi, Amy, Ridley, Dave, Mitch Albom, and me

. . . plus Josh Kelly on drums and Erasmo Paolo on sax.

We do it for the music, but we also do it for the compan-

ionship. We like each other, and we like having a chance to

talk sometimes about the real job, the day job people are

always telling us not to quit. We are writers, and we never ask

one another where we get our ideas; we know we don’t know.

One night while we were eating Chinese before a gig in

Miami Beach, I asked Amy if there was any one question she

was never asked during the Q-and-A that follows almost every

writer’s talk—that question you never get to answer when

you’re standing in front of a group of author-struck fans and

pretending you don’t put your pants on one leg at a time like

everyone else. Amy paused, thinking it over very carefully,

and then said: “No one ever asks about the language.”

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to her for saying that.

I had been playing with the idea of writing a little book

about writing for a year or more at that time, but had held

back because I didn’t trust my own motivations—why did I

want to write about writing? What made me think I had

anything worth saying?

The easy answer is that someone who has sold as many

books of ﬁction as I have must have something worthwhile to say

about writing it, but the easy answer isn’t always the truth.

Colonel Sanders sold a hell of a lot of fried chicken, but I’m not

sure anyone wants to know how he made it. If I was going to

Stephen King

be presumptuous enough to tell people how to write, I felt

there had to be a better reason than my popular success. Put

another way, I didn’t want to write a book, even a short one

like this, that would leave me feeling like either a literary gas-

bag or a transcendental asshole. There are enough of those

books—and those writers—on the market already, thanks.

But Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language.

They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but

they don’t ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles also

care about the language, in our humble way, and care pas-

sionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper.

What follows is an attempt to put down, brieﬂy and simply,

how I came to the craft, what I know about it now, and how

it’s done. It’s about the day job; it’s about the language.

This book is dedicated to Amy Tan, who told me in a very

simple and direct way that it was okay to write it.

On Writing

Second Foreword

This is a short book because most books about writing are

ﬁlled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included,

don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it

works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I ﬁg-

ured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.

One notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of

Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. There is little or

no detectable bullshit in that book. (Of course it’s short; at

eighty-ﬁve pages it’s much shorter than this one.) I’ll tell you

right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements

of Style. Rule 17 in the chapter titled Principles of Composi-

tion is “Omit needless words.” I will try to do that here.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

llSCRIBNER1230AvenueoftheAmericasNewYork,NY10020VisitusontheWorldWideWebhttp://www.SimonSays.comCopyright©2000byStephenKingAllrightsreserved,includingtherightofreproductioninwholeorinpartinanyform.SCRIBNERanddesignaretrademarksofMacmillanLibraryReferenceUSA,Inc.,usedunderlicensebySimon&Schuster,thep...

展开>> 收起<<

KING, Stephen - On Writing.pdf

共278页,预览56页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

KING, Stephen - On Writing

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: