… With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. His book On Writing has a section devoted to explaining why The adverb is not your friend.Īdverbs … are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.I believe the author Stephen King would hate the language of the Common Core State Standards for one reason: unnecessary adverbs. "The Plain Dealer" (Cleveland)The best book on writing. "USA Today"A fascinating look at the evolution and redemption of one of the hardest-working storytellers writing today. "The Washington Post Book World"Combines autobiography and admonition, inspirations and instruction.
Ever! "USA Today"A fascinating look at the evolution and redemption of one of the hardest-working storytellers writing today. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing." The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room.
"I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash." But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's.
The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists.
0 kommentar(er)
