From Stephen King: On Writing

Stephen King’s books have sold over 350 million copies. Like them or loathe them, you have to admit that’s impressive. King’s manual On Writing reveals that he’s relentlessly dedicated to his craft. He admits that not even The King himself always sticks to his rules—but trying to follow them is a good start. Here are our favorite pieces of advice for aspiring writers:
 1. First write for yourself, and then worry about the audience. “When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story. Your stuff starts out being just for you, but then it goes out.”
 2. Don’t use passive voice. “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe. The timid fellow writes “The meeting will be held at seven o’clock” because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know. ‘Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put that meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.’ There, by God! Don’t you feel better?”
 3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend. Consider the sentence “He closed the door firmly.” It’s by no means a terrible sentence, but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. What about context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, then isn’t ‘firmly’ an extra word? Isn’t it redundant?”
 4. Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said.” “While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”
 5. But don’t obsess over perfect grammar. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story… to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all. “
 6. The magic is in you. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing. Dumbo got airborne 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.”  7. Read, read, read. “You have to read widely, constantly refining (and redefining) your own work as you do so. If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”
 8. Don’t worry about making other people happy. “Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second to least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
 9. Turn off the TV. “Most exercise facilities are now equipped with TVs, but TV—while working out or anywhere else—really is about the last thing an aspiring writer needs. If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhard on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination, and that means, I’m afraid, that Geraldo, Keigh Obermann, and Jay Leno must go. Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”
 10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.”
 11. There are two secrets to success. “When I’m asked for ‘the secret of my success’ (an absurd idea, that, but impossible to get away from), I sometimes say there are two: I stayed physically healthy, and I stayed married. It’s a good answer because it makes the question go away, and because there is an element of truth in it. The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible. And I believe the converse is also true: that my writing and the pleasure I take in it has contributed to the stability of my health and my home life.”
 12. Write one word at a time. “A radio talk-show host asked me how I wrote. My reply—’One word at a time’—seemingly left him without a reply. I think he was trying to decide whether or not I was joking. I wasn’t. In the end, it’s always that simple. Whether it’s a vignette of a single page or an epic trilogy like ‘The Lord Of The Rings,’ the work is always accomplished one word at a time.”
 13. Eliminate distraction. “There should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall.”
 14. Stick to your own style. “One cannot imitate a writer’s approach to a particular genre, no matter how simple what the writer is doing may seem. You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile, in other words. People who decide to make a fortune writing lik John Grisham or Tom Clancy produce nothing but pale imitations, by and large, because vocabulary is not the same thing as feeling and plot is light years from the truth as it is understood by the mind and the heart.”
 15. Dig. “When, during the course of an interview for The New Yorker, I told the interviewer (Mark Singer) that I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground, he said that he didn’t believe me. I replied that that was fine, as long as he believed that I believe it. And I do. Stories aren’t souvenir tee-shirts or Game Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it’s enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all the gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.”
 16. Take a break. “If you’ve never done it before, you’ll find reading your book over after a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience. It’s yours, you’ll recognize it as yours, even be able to remember what tune was on the stereo when you wrote certain lines, and yet it will also be like reading the work of someone else, a soul-twin, perhaps. This is the way it should be, the reason you waited. It’s always easier to kill someone else’s darlings that it is to kill your own.”
 17. Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings. “Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your ecgocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.)”
 18. The research shouldn’t overshadow the story. “If you do need to do research because parts of your story deal with things about which you know little or nothing, remember that word back. That’s where research belongs: as far in the background and the back story as you can get it. You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. potential of collie pups, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”  19. You become a writer simply by reading and writing. “You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in the Oxford, Mississippi post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”
 20. Writing is about getting happy. “Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.” Which of these rules do you like best? 

Othello (1952)

Orson Welles, 1952, 92m

This Othello is a flight of dazzling cinematographic imagination. It is a dark, brooding and melancholy vision set in the moisture permeated island of Cyprus, the waves from the far stretching sea lapping the stone architecture of the castle. Taking the play for granted, what remains from his viewing is the haunting power of the chiseled black and white images, the boldly crafted brushstrokes of the camera. It is backed by a perfect score which unobtrusively matches the flow of images. It is indeed difficult to do justice to the visual beauty of this film in words. The drama itself starts of somewhat slowly, but gathers pace to a satisfying climax. Welles as Othello gives a somber and restrained portrayal, very unlike the theatrics of Olivier. This is probably not a good introduction to the drama but stands as a cinematic vision on it's own strength. The movie is a tribute to the power of black and white. So what if the camera and not Shakespeare occupies the center space!

Richard III (1995)

Ian McKellan, 1995, 98m

Ian McKellan transplants the most unabashed of Shakespeare villains to the twentieth century, lending it an altogether unexpected immediacy and magnifying the impact. The action takes place in the second quarter of the last century, and although the movie is a deliberate cocktail of anachronisms, in flavour it combines into a slightly parodied presentation of the worst nightmares we have known. What is retained is the language and lines of the original, which combine with the modern setting to give a bizarre touch to the story, which ultimately becomes a stylised commentary on recent modern times, with specific focus on the Europe of the thirties. The setting is British, with some American flourishes and many echoes of Europe. The characters, the British aristocrats identical to the original play, don military uniforms or business suits, and tanks and aeroplanes substitute for the horses and swords. When Richard shouts, "My kingdom for a horse !", ongoing is a battle of armored carriers.

The cinematic element dominates over the drama and the movie goes much beyond what the bard could have said or conceived of. The film uses parts of the Shakespearean script as an element of a surreal recreation of the megalomania that characterizes our times. Everything is larger as twentieth century evil dwarfs the medieval conception. This is an "adult" movie compared to Olivier's, which is more or less a faithful photostat of what the audience at the Globe may have seen. Olivier's Richard is almost kiddish in comparison to what McKellan's is capable of. This is truly a state of the art Richard III complete with nuclear teeth. After all this is 1995. This is a Richard who means business, more than the narcissistic hunchback we are familiar with. It has more the flavor of Cabaret (1972) and Salo (1979).

Richard III

Laurence Olivier, 1955, 158m

Richard III may be the most colorful of the bard's constellation of rogues. He is the only one physically deformed and who has the central role in the play. Glossing over the historical intricacies of plot, Richard ascends the ladder to the throne by a series of murders of his close relatives, including two young nephews, his wife and a cousin. Moreover, at the outset, he declaims his resolution to chose the path of unbridled evil, as a revenge against nature for his deformed body. Olivier gives a spectacular performance which cannot fail to delight lay viewer and critic alike. From his hawk like nose (is it his own?), his marvelously executed limp,  the crooked monumental posture as he stands, his ominous shadow which trails him like a company logo and the masterful elocution of the lines, it is the work of an actor born to do Shakespeare without apology or inhibition.

This is Shakespeare's first play and he probably didn't want to risk a failure. He treads the safe path to the heart of the audience by providing bloodshed, wickedness, pathos (the killings are portrayed with extended dramatic detail to make them as heart rending as they are gruesome) and romance. The costumes, sets and the portrayal of the concluding battle are all competently done to evoke the era portrayed.

Shakespeare's villains are men driven by intelligence and ambition, single minded worldly risers who have shaken off the shackles of conscience. As such, they are psychologically simple, since once we decide to overlook the niceties of right and wrong, life becomes clear, focused and mechanical as a chess game. Obsessive monologers must be clear thinkers. Whether it is Richard, Iago or Edmund, the evil is played out to (almost) the very end with scarcely a hiccup of remorse. (Only milk liver'd Macbeth sleeps no more, but he wasn't villain enough to start with.) Only under the stare of death does the edifice of evil show signs of crumbling.

This is a drama more entertaining than profound, of Shakespeare's green days, and flawlessly done here by Laurence Olivier.

Henry V

Laurence Olivier, 1944, 135m

Of Shakespeare's ten or so dramas about English history this is one of the most popular, at least on the Isles. This filmed version was made in the thick of WW2, with support from the British government, including personal interest taken by Churchill. The film was intended to bolster the morale of the British public at a time of crisis. Shakespeare's play has a strong nationalistic streak, though it is nuanced by many negative aspects of the king's personality and deeds, which have been skipped. Keeping the purpose of war time propaganda in mind the drama has been pruned to half, portraying him as a popular paragon.

The film is in brilliant technicolor. It starts of as a play at the Globe theater. We see the boisterous Elizabethan audience and a hilarious parody of the opening as the chorus keeps forgetting his words and has to keep fumbling at the sheets of the script. There is a sudden downpour, which hardly dampens the spirits of either the audience or performers, the more or less open air nature of the theatre notwithstanding.The stage flavor is retained for much of the film and colorful backdrops are often used. But then it gradually expands to the open spaces of cinema and the battle scenes with the French adversary are brilliantly filmed. For all the staginess, there is an undercurrent of realism and urgency, considering the real war which was going on, and the the film's audience must have heard it's rumbling and echoes throughout