Stephen King’s 20 Laws For Writers And How To Get Ideas

Stephen King ‘s 20 Laws For Writers And How To Get Inspired

<img src="Stephen-King-Bhushan-Mahadani.png" alt="Stephen King Bhushan Mahadani">

 

Stephen King is the guy who has huge list of adaptation of his work into films, television, comic books, stage theater and music. He is the guy who penned my favorite The Shawshank  Redemption, The Green Mile And IT. There is no better person who can teach writing. In his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft Stephen King has relieved some of the laws a writer should always follow. Here is the great learning resource for writers.

Stephen King describes the importance of writing room

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

Indeed, Sleep is the greatest creative aphrodisiac. Stephen King very well understood that sleep like state when you are awake increase your power of visualization, which is the basic need of a filmmaker and writer. Stephen King further describes this

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight  so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

When you want to do something creative first thing you need to do is you start separating yourself from the crowd and start spending as much time as you can with yourself. Following are the Stephen King’s 20 Laws For Writers.

1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.”

6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
11. There are two secrets to success. “I stayed physical healthy, and I stayed married.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”

13. Eliminate distraction. “There’s should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or video games for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”

17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “(kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “Remember that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”

20.Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid or making friends. Writing is magic, as much as the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.”

Bonus : Here Is Stephen King Speaks About How He Gets Inspired

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AtJssWJp3c

If you follow these Stephen King’s rules no can can stop you from writing good scripts. The best time to start is now, so start writing but always keep in mind Stephen King’s advice and no one can stop you.

I hope you enjoyed reading.

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