My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Steven King’s ON WRITING is part memoir, part Elements of Style; it’s also one of the most modest, generous, thoughtful, and succinct books on fiction writing I’ve ever read. Most how-to books on writing are full of blarney and mustard; Steve’s book focuses on a few important stylistic and structural insights, and makes their value clear. The book also sheds useful light on the role writing has played in his own life, and shines light on his struggle with “the drink.” And it winds up with a harrowing re-telling of his awful 1998 accident, and the way he managed to find his way back to the world, mainly due to the love of his wife Tabby–and the muse itself. A short, brilliant, clarifying work. It brought me new appreciation for all of King’s fiction, and sent me immediately into re-reading his work. Which means, guess what, right now, I’m deep into THE STAND…. hope I don’t “come down” with anything….
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Jenny Boylan's twelfth book, FALCON QUINN AND THE CRIMSON VAPOR, now on sale from HarperCollins!
Browse Inside Falcon Quinn!
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PROFESSOR JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN is the author of twelve books, including She's Not There: a Life in Two Genders, and I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted, both published by Random House. A novelist, memoirist, and short story writer, she is also a nationally known advocate for civil rights. Jenny has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Live with Larry King, the Today Show, the Barbara Walters Special, NPR's Marketplace and Talk of the Nation; she has also been the subject of documentaries on CBS News' 48 Hours. and The History Channel. She is a regular contributor to the op/ed page of the New York Times and Conde Nast Traveler magazine. Since 1988, she has been Professor of English at Colby College in Maine; in 2010, she was the Hoyer-Updike Distinguished Writer at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. She has also served on the judging committee of the Fulbright Scholars, administered by the U.S. Department of State.
Her next published book will be STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU: Parenthood in Two Genders, coming from Crown/Random House in 2013, along with an updated, 10th anniversary edition of SHE'S NOT THERE.
Check out the Twitter feed at JennyBoylan; or join Jennifer Finney Boylan on facebook.
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3 Comments
On Writing is awesome! I recommend it to everybody, but all of my writer friends sort of scoff at it.
Jenny,
I reda,reread,the Stand last year!Hadent read it since it was new.I picked up one book Steven id don writing a few years back.It was great.Ill look into this one also.
See ya soon!G
I finally read the unabridged The Stand earlier this year; I get a little freaked out now every time I see another epidemic coming ’round. Just such a great piece of character-driven fiction, using the plague as the background setting. Characterization to me has always seemed the strength of King’s work; his plot devices sometimes sink or swim, but the characters usually make the stories worth reading. Stephen’s writing style has definitely impacted my writing, and I first really got the sense of story as being an “unearthing [of something that already exists]” rather than a “wholesale creation [of something new]” from his comments and especially from the metaphor in his Tommyknockers novel.