Whatever you may think of Stephen King's books, he's one of us: A writer who really zeroes in on his audience. That's why he sells so many books.
That's also why this recent post at Mental Floss, 10 Writing Tips From Stephen King includes some great advice for fundraisers:
- "If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut."
- "The scariest moment is always just before you start."
- "You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you."
- "Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's."
- "I think the best stories always end up being about the people rather than the event, which is to say character-driven."
- "The road to hell is paved with adverbs."
- "Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe."
(These are all from King's book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.
