Prelude: King opens the round swinging, his "voice" on full display-- "There are no bad dogs... but don't tell that to the parent of a child mauled by a pit bull. He or she is apt to bust your beak."
Chapter 2: Here, King seems to criticize writers like Harper Lee and Thomas Harris for not writing enough, but I tend to lean more toward the argument of writers like Sue Grafton (who, incidentally, has written around twenty novels). Grafton theorizes that all writers enter this world with a set number of stories in their heads, and after they've reached that point, nothing they write will be as meaningful as what they wrote before.
Chapter 5: I like King's idea that the best plots are a by-product of characterization. The Sisters Brothers, one of the best novels of the year and quite possibly a future entry in every major "required reading" list known to man is an artistically written character study, but the plot never suffers. It is, after all, the characters that cause the plot to progress. I also love the Dick and Jane writing excercise he details later in the chapter.
Chapter 7: King uses a passage of an Elmore Leonard novel. I've read several of Leonard's books and it's true: he's one of the best dialogue writers in the business. In fact, King's example is mediocre by Leonard's standards.
Chapter 10: The Stand was one of the first Stephen King books I read, and one of the best. Not quite my favorite of his (that'd be Bag of Bones), but it's up there. It was interesting to read about the struggles he underwent in writing that mammoth of a novel. (Until I read The Winds of War, The Stand was the longest book I had ever read.)
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