On Writing By Stephen King If you were going to learn how to cook, would you learn from someone who has a lot of experience, or from someone who has only been in the kitchen a few times? The answer is obvious, you would want to learn from someone with a lot of experience. Stephen King has written 50 novels, 5 nonfiction books, and over 200 short stories. He is a master at his craft. That is why I was interested in pulling his book, "On Writing: a Memoir of the Craft.\" off of the shelf. I figured he would share a lot of good insight into how he was able to be such a prolific writer. I was not disappointed. King provided a number of great rules for how to write a book. Interestingly enough, some of those rules seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, others seemed to be in line with what other authors have said, and they were kind of a how to write, step by step, that I haven't seen anywhere else. I really liked how Stephen's style is conversational, he just says what he thinks. Things like, write for yourself first, really resonated with me. Among the highlights of what he teaches are things like develop the character and how they react to the situation more than adhering to a plot. That is different that I have heard before, and actually makes a lot of sense. His ideas on how to write faster focus on knowing a head of time what you are going to write about. He advocates reading a lot, in different genre, in order to be more rounded and to get a feeling about what good writing should be like. I take his concluding rule to heart, writing is getting happy. Writing shouldn't feel like a drudgery, it is meant to uplift and improve the lives of those reading. It should therefore improve the life of the one writing. Learn more about this awesome book: http://austinsgift.com/on-writing/