Overcoming Fear as a Writer: Lessons from Stephen King

Unlocking Creativity and Overcoming Fear: Practical Advice for Aspiring Writers

Oct 02, 2024

This advice was found in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King and covers:

The similarities between writing and dreaming
The importance of creating your writing space
The problem with adverbs

…and more.

For additional insights, be sure to check out 10 Writing Tips from the Original “Mad Man”, 8 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck, and Henry Miller’s 11 Rules of Writing.

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“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 to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you prepare for sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual.”

Cultivating a Creative Sleep

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

Creating Your Writing Space

“The space can be humble...and it really needs only one thing: A door you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world that you mean business.”
“If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room and certainly no TV or video games to distract you. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall. For any writer—especially beginners—it’s wise to eliminate as many distractions as possible. As you continue to write, you will naturally filter out these distractions, but at the start, it’s best to tackle them beforehand. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.”

The Adverb Is Not Your Friend

“Adverbs…are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With adverbs, the writer often signals fear that he or she isn’t expressing themselves clearly, that the point or picture isn’t getting across.
Consider the sentence: ‘He closed the door firmly.’ It’s not a terrible sentence (at least it has an active verb), but does 'firmly' really need to be there? You might argue it shows a difference between ‘He closed the door’ and ‘He slammed the door,’ but what about context? Shouldn’t the previous prose tell us how he closed the door? If it does, isn’t 'firmly' an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”
Some might accuse me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. But if you fail to root it out, you’ll find five the next day…fifty the day after that. Before you know it, your lawn is completely covered with dandelions. By then, you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”

Overcoming Fear in Writing

“I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. If one is writing for pleasure, that fear may be mild—timidity is the word I’ve used here. However, if one is working under deadline—like a school paper, a newspaper article, or the SAT writing sample—that fear may be intense. Dumbo flew with the help of a magic feather; you may feel the urge to grasp a passive verb or one of those nasty adverbs for the same reason. Just remember before you do that Dumbo didn’t need the feather; the magic was in him.”
“Good writing often comes from letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself—beginning with the need to define some types of writing as “good” and others as “bad”—is fearful behavior.”

If you found Stephen King's advice helpful, you might also enjoy 10 Writing Tips from the Original “Mad Man”, 8 Writing Tips From John Steinbeck, and 30 Writing Tips from Jack Kerouac. Each article provides valuable tips that can further inspire your writing.

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