On Writing

The Question Nobody Asks

Somewhere in the mid-nineteen-nineties, in a Chinese restaurant in Miami Beach before a Rock Bottom Remainders gig, Stephen King turned to Amy Tan and asked her the question every novelist eventually asks another novelist. What's the one question you never get asked? Tan thought about it for a beat and said: nobody ever asks about the language. That answer is the secret hinge of this entire book. King had been carrying around the idea of a craft book for about a year, and he kept stalling because he didn't want to come off, as he puts it, like a literary gas-bag or a transcendental asshole. Selling a lot of fried chicken, he reminds himself, doesn't mean you have anything useful to say about how to fry chicken. But Tan's answer cracked it open. If nobody asks about the language, then somebody should talk about the language. So he did, and the dedication on the front page reads simply: This book is dedicated to Amy Tan.

He opens with two ground rules that double as warnings about what kind of book this won't be. First: most books about writing are stuffed with bullshit, so this one will be short. Second: the editor is always right, even though no writer takes all editorial advice, because to write is human and to edit is divine. He cites Strunk and White's The Elements of Style as one of the few craft books without detectable bullshit, eighty-five pages of plain marching orders, and he pledges allegiance to Rule Seventeen: omit needless words. That pledge sets the tone for everything that follows. If a sentence can be cut, cut it. If a word is showing off, replace it. If a paragraph is dressed up like a household pet in evening clothes, strip it back down to skin.