Writing

"Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts." - Stephen King

"writing fiction in America as we enter the twenty-first century is no job for intellectual cowards. There are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see… or to at least shut up about what you do see that’s different." - Stephen King

"The situation comes first. The characters—always flat and unfeatured, to begin with—come next." - Stephen King

"my books tend to be based on situation rather than story. Some of the ideas which have produced those books are more complex than others, but the majority start out with the stark simplicity of a department store window display or a waxwork tableau." - Stephen King

"Still, I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season." - Stephen King

"If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that." - Stephen King

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot." - Stephen King

"The most important is that the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s. Running a close second was the realization that stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea. Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you... See more

"“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”" - Stephen King