Post by account_disabled on Dec 24, 2023 5:08:35 GMT
I used to dislike books about writing . I thought they were perhaps too restrictive and writing - although respecting language and grammar and the usual laws on communication - needs to be free. Too many rules would risk suffocating it. Then I read On Writing by Stephen King, because I had heard good things about it and because it was part of my reading in English to improve the language. On Writing is not an ordinary book about writing and I noticed this immediately. It is a biography, above all.
It is Stephen King's life, however, confined to the literary environment. It is Stephen King who tells us what he read as a child, what he began to write, from a plagiarism - who among us at a young age has not Special Data shamelessly copied something already published? – to the first satisfactions. I remember when I started writing my fantasy novel after reading The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. My protagonist had a name similar to Shea and then, after several changes, ended up being called Shea. “Why did Terry Brooks come up with that name?” I asked myself, in my naivety as a writer who failed even before starting.
That novel, fortunately, over the years was abandoned, revived in another form - that of The Lord of the Rings which I read later - and then set aside again. In short, we grow and understand things that previously eluded us. Immediately afterwards I started reading another book on writing, The Writer's Craft by John Gardner, because I had read well about that too. It is different from King's, but it is still a sort of biography of one's literary experience. Gardner talks to us about his years of teaching and the young authors he met. Above all, he outlines their defects - which are also ours. It is perhaps not his biography, but that of the writer, of the figure of someone who is about to write a story down on paper, in black and white.
It is Stephen King's life, however, confined to the literary environment. It is Stephen King who tells us what he read as a child, what he began to write, from a plagiarism - who among us at a young age has not Special Data shamelessly copied something already published? – to the first satisfactions. I remember when I started writing my fantasy novel after reading The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks. My protagonist had a name similar to Shea and then, after several changes, ended up being called Shea. “Why did Terry Brooks come up with that name?” I asked myself, in my naivety as a writer who failed even before starting.
That novel, fortunately, over the years was abandoned, revived in another form - that of The Lord of the Rings which I read later - and then set aside again. In short, we grow and understand things that previously eluded us. Immediately afterwards I started reading another book on writing, The Writer's Craft by John Gardner, because I had read well about that too. It is different from King's, but it is still a sort of biography of one's literary experience. Gardner talks to us about his years of teaching and the young authors he met. Above all, he outlines their defects - which are also ours. It is perhaps not his biography, but that of the writer, of the figure of someone who is about to write a story down on paper, in black and white.
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