Here, he runs through some solid writing tips that I think quite a few people will be aware of - don't use too many passive sentences, avoid adverbs like the plague.
The style of writing here is much more off the cuff - this is the kind of stuff that rolls off the tongue for Stephen King and easily rolls off the pen as well. The second part of the book - which is the "On Writing" segment - gets put on hold after a horrific accident left him on a long road to recovery. The first part - his memoir - is a carefully crafted confession of his addiction to drugs, beer and writing. Towards the end, Stephen King confesses that this book took him a lot longer to finish than usual (<3 months). Time to boot up the laptop and pop the kettle on again I think. I've not read anything else that paints the whole picture in a way that On Writing does, nor anything that fills you with the confidence to sit down in front of a blank page. It's this framework that separates On Writing from the rest of the pack it helps you understand how the small stuff fits in to the big stuff - it reminds you how narrative, dialogue, character, sentence, and paragraph work together to create the whole story, without getting bogged down in the details for too long. The second section is Uncle Stevie's how-to-guide for writers - a kind of framework for thinking about how you get the words down on the page, what words they should be ("The road to hell is paved with adverbs"), and getting rid of the words that don't belong ("To write is human, to edit is divine"). But King's success is no accident - this cat can write. Horror isn't a genre I'd pick up without some serious prompting, so maybe I needed a book like this to show me all the great stuff I was missing out on (straight afterwards I went out and bought a collection of his short stories, so it likely won't be a problem for long). I pride myself on the eclectic nature of the books I read, and yet I've not so much as flipped to the back cover of the Shining, or even grazed the spine of Carrie.
Here's a strange thing: he's one of the most successful authors of all time, and I hadn't read a single one of Stephen King's books. At times hilarious and moving, but always honest, the first section had me laughing out loud (when his older brother tricks him into wiping his ass with Poison Ivy), marveling at his work ethic ("By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it"), and amazed at his success. Split into two parts, On Writing first tells the story of what made Stephen King a writer. One of the most successful writers in history must know something about his craft, right? Which is why I reached for Stephen King's On Writing. Sure, I'm the greatest living novelist to never write a novel, if only I could get time to write the damn thing. Every year I come up against the same challenge: I want to be a fiction writer, but I don't write fiction. Every January I start to look inward - thinking about what I achieve next year, and what I need to change to make it happen.