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Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King'sOn Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. 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. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "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." As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a janitor cleaning a high-school girls locker room. 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. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolized his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing."
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. 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. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why 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.
King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher.
Average Customer Rating:
Excellent reading for fiction authors but even nonfiction writers will be enlightened (and entertained in the process)
I read a lot but I don't read much fiction and have never read any of Stephen King's novels (I'm probably missing out on a lot but fiction's just not my thing). I would still recommend this book to anyone who does any kind of writing (or reading). It's a thoroughly entertaining and enlightening read. I found myself laughing out loud numerous times as I read through it (one of my tests of good/great books).
If you're a fiction (or even nonfiction writer) it will be even more rewarding experience. There's a lot of advice floating around out there about how to be a successful author. Most of it's bad or borderline bad; some of it's fair; some good; a little of it's great. This is some of the great stuff!
A Pretty Good Book.
Stephen King is a dandy writer, no question about it. I prefer his early books, but that's my bent. King comes across as someone who came up through the ranks and achieved success through merit and hard work. The how-to-write part is standard boiler-plate stuff found in every how-to-write book. But the memoir is very enjoyable.
More for the Reader and Not the Writer
I'd never recommend this book to a young writer unless they already have a decent amount of knowledge on the business. This book offers little writing advice, and a lot of it is very opinionated, which can throw a new writer off of his or her developing style. So as a how-to book this book offers little. But as a book of what not to do when the stress of writing is too high this is the best. Most of us have heard of Stephen King's past troubles, but this book tells it graphically and with no excuses left behind by the author. It a caution sign on the road of writing, telling you to stay straight and not to turn off on those drug filled rest stops. For that alone, this book is worth the read. More for the reader, though, and not the writer.
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Excellent reading for fiction authors but even nonfiction writers will be enlightened (and entertained in the process) 
A Pretty Good Book. 
