Stephen King | On Writing

Personal notes taken from "On Writing"−a masterpiece written by The King.

The timid fellow writes The meeting will be held at seven o'clock because that somebody 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?

I won't say there's no place for the passive tense. Suppose, for instance, a fellow dies in the kitchen but ends up somewhere else. The body was carried from the kitchen and placed on the parlor sofa is a fair way to put this, although "was carried" and "was placed" still irk the shit out of me. I accept them but I don't embrace them. What I should embrace is Freddy and Myra carried the body out of the kitchen and laid it on the parlor sofa. Why does the body have to be the subject of the sentence, anyway? It's dead, for Christ's sake! Fuhgeddaboudit!

Two pages of the passive voice−just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction−make me want to scream. It's weak, it's circuitous, and it's frequently tortuous, as well. How about this: My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was begun. Oh, man−who farted right? A simpler way to express this idea−sweeter and more forceful, as well−might be this: My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss. I'll never forget it. I'm not in love with this because it uses with twice in four words, but at least we're out of that awful passive voice.

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When I am 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 (at least until a van knocked me down by the side of the road in the summer of 1999), 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.

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In an early interview (this was to promote Carrie, I think), 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. The door closes the rest of the world out; it also serves to close you in and keep you focused on the job at hand.

* * *

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

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My all-time favorite similes, by the way, come from hardboiled-detective fiction of the forties and fifties, and the literary descendants of the dime-dreadful writers. These favorites include "It was darker than a carload of assholes" (George V. Higgins) and "I lit a cigarette [that] tasted like a plumber's handkerchief" (Raymond Chandler).

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A Quota for Errors

An excellent essay from Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister's marvelous book - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams.

For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude we need to take specific pains to change.

Speaking to a group of software managers, we introduced a strategy for what we think of as iterative design. The idea is that some designs are intrinsically defect-prone; they ought to be rejected, not repaired. Such dead ends should be expected in the design activity. The lost effort of the dead end is a small price to pay for a clean, fresh start. To our surprise, many managers felt this would pose an impossible political problem for their own bosses: "How can we throw away a product that our company has paid to produce?" They seemed to believe that they'd be better off salvaging the defective version even though it might cost more in the long run.

Fostering an atmosphere that doesn't allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don't try to systematize the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions lest they make them incorrectly. The average level of technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grieviously.

The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they've been down, and by making sure they understand that "none" is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated-that's part of what they're being paid for.

Do One Thing Better Than Anyone Else You Know

An excellent essay from Cal Newport's book - How To Win At College

If you want to succeed at college, you have to develop a healthy sense of self-confidence. This doesn't mean you should be arrogant-such people are often secretly insecure. Instead, you want to be self-assured, proud, and modest all at the time. These are the traits of a well-liked, successful student.

Easier said than done? Not really. One good technique for bolstering your confidence is mastering a skill. Everyone is good at something. All you need to do is to find out what this something is for you, and then practice until you are better at it than any of your friends at school. Be it playing a guitar, writing a fiction, shooting hoops, or cooking, develop a skill you can be known for. Again, this is not about bragging rights. People can know you are good at something without you having to constantly remind them. This is about reinforcing your identity and sense of self-confidence.

Why this is so important? Because college is an overwhelming social environment. You are thrown into a small space with thousands of other students who know nothing about you. Many students fail to maintain a strong sense of identity in this situation., and instead begin to peg their self-worth on receiving the respect and admiration of others. If you're invited to a hot party, do well on a test, or catch the eye of that cute girl (or boy) ahead of you in the lunch line, you feel good about yourself. But if you end up with no plans for Friday night, bomb a test, or realize that the cute girl was actually smiling at her bodybuilder boyfriend standing right behind you, well, then you feel pretty lousy. The state of your self-esteem is like a roller-coaster ride, differing from day to to day depending on events beyond your control. You cannot win at college with this mindset.

When you are dependent on good things happening to make you feel good, your life becomes centered on preserving a good mood. This will constrain you, because if you are constantly worried about avoiding anything negative, you will never do anything out of the ordinary. Standout students, on the other hand, do very little that is ordinary. This is what makes them so phenomenal. They find better ways, uncover new approaches, and question everything. The only way to develop such an aggressive mind-set is to have a strong sense of self-confidence to back you up.

Developing these trait is not easy. But doing one thing better than anyone else you know is an excellent start toward accomplishing this goal. By mastering one activity in your life, you are putting a stake into the ground, giving yourself one thing to feel sure of, and making a declaration about who you are. Don't let others dictate how you should feel about yourself, strengthen your identity-then conquer your world.

The Road To Excellence

A few notes collected from 'The Road To Excellence' - An interesting book edited by K. Anders Ericsson.

A more direct claim about the necessity for intense preparation was made by Simon and Chase (1973). They found that about 10 years of preparation was necessary to attain an international level of chess skill and they suggested similar prerequisites in other domains.
. . .
Even when individuals have access to a similar training environment, large individual differences in performance are still often observed. Furthermore, amount of experience in a domain is often a weak predictor of performance. Rather than accepting these facts as evidence for innate differences in ability (i.e, talent), Ericcson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) tried to identify those training activities that would be mist closely related to improvements in performance. Based on a review of a century of laboratory studies of learning and skill acquisition, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) concluded that the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections for error. When all these elements are present they used the term deliberate practice to characterize training activities.
. . .
They found that concentration is the most essential aspect of deliberate practice.  Deliberate practice in music is consistent with the critical role of concentration. Master teachers (Auer, 1921; Galamian, 1962) argue that full concentration is essential and that when it wanes the musician to rest, because practice without full concentration may actually impair rather improve performance (Seashore, 1938/1967).
    An analysis of practice sessions (extracted from the diaries of the expert musicians) is consistent with the requirement of concentration. After about an hour of practice in the morning when the ability to perform most complex cognitive activities has been found to be the highest (Folkard & Monk, 1985). There is also indirect evidence for the effortfulness of concentration through the additional need for rest among expert performers. Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer (1993) found that the higher levels of practice were associated with longer duration of sleep, typically in the form of afternoon naps. This pattern of napping and resting has also been found in other domains expertise, such as sports.

Smartcuts

Notes taken on "Smartcuts" - a brilliant book by Shane Snow.

Hacking the ladder

Bigger or better is a scavenger hunt, a sort of trick-or-treating (young) adults. Players divide into teams and begin with a small object, like a toothpick, then disperse and knock on neighborhood doors, one house after another.

      At each answered door, the players introduce themselves with something on the order of, "We're playing a game called Bigger or Better. Do you have something in your house that's slightly bigger or better than this..." (display object) " ...that you want to trade with us?"

      The first few houses are the toughest. People relaxing at night in their homes aren't often searching of toothpicks. Even in the friendly Rocky Mountains a homeowner can be put off by such a request. But before long, a stranger will good-naturedly offer a piece of gum or that toothpick, and the game is on.

      At the next house, the gum becomes a ballpoint pen. At the next: a pack of Post-it notes. Then: a copy of last month's Nylon magazine. The magazine becomes a bouquet of flowers left by an unwanted admirer. The flowers get swapped for an old hat, and the hat is exchanged for novelty T-shirt. In this phase of the game, the players benefit from a bit of curiosity, a little charity, and the fact that people were planning on getting rid of most of these objects anyway.

      But after enough trades, the players hold objects of significant value in their hands. Now the boy who opens the door sincerely wants the T-shirt. He trades his lava lamp for it. The girls next door like the lava lamp and decide to part with a vintage mirror. The old woman down the street collects antiques; she accepts the mirror exchange for an old BMX bike in the garage.

      When time is up, the players return home to compare results. After a dozen or so trades, teams have turned toothpicks into a stereo system, a set of golf clubs, and a television set. One group even drags in a full-size canoe.

      Not bad for a sober night out.

Training with Masters

Rapid Feedback

Platforms

Effort for the sake of effort is foolish as a tradition as paying dues. How much better is hard work when it's amplified by a lever? Platforms teach us skills and allow us to focus on being great, rather than reinventing wheels or repeating ourselves.
      "You can build on top of a lot of things that exist in this world," David Heinemeier Hannson told me. "Somebody goes in and does that hard, ground level science based work.
      "And then top of that, " he smiles, "you build the art."

Waves
Another academic duo, Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis of the University of Southern California, published a study in 1993 to see if historical evidence backed the claim that market pioneers were more likely to succeed. They researched that market pioneers were more likely to succeed. They researched what happened to 500 brands in 50 product categories, from toothpaste to video recorders to fax machines to chewing gum.
      Startlingly, the research showed that 47 percent of first movers failed. Only about half the companies that started selling a product first remained the market five years later, and only 11 percent of first movers remained market leaders over long term.
      By contrast, early leaders-companies that took control of a product's market share after the first movers pioneered them-had only an 8 percent failure rate. Fifty-three percent of the time in the Golder and Tellis study, an early leader became the market leader in a category.
      Like early pioneers crossing the American plains, first movers have to create their own wagon trails, but later movers can follow the ruts. First movers take on burden of educating customers, setting up infrastructure, getting regulatory approvals, and making mistakes-getting feedback and adjusting.
      Fast followers, on the other hand, benefit from free-rider effects. The pioneers clear the way in terms of market education and infrastructure and learn the hard lessons, so the next guys can steal that works, learn objectively from the first movers' failures, and spend more effort elsewhere. The first wave clears the way for a more powerful ride.
. . . .
Conventional thinking leads talented and driven people to believe that if they simply work hard, luck will eventually strike. That's like saying if a surfer treads water in the same spot for long enough, a wave will come; it certainly happens to some people, once in a while, but it's not the most effective strategy for success. Paradoxically, it's actually a lazier move.
      There's a reason some people practice things for twenty years and never become experts; a golfer can put 30,000 hours of practice and not improve his game if he's gripping his clubs wrong the whole time. A business can work five times harder and longer that its neighbors and still lose to rivals that read the market better. Just like a pro surfer never wins by staying in one spot.
      "I think that being able to pick and read good waves is almost more important than surfing well,' Moore tells me. "If you don't have a good or better platform to perform on than your opponent, you are going to lose."
      Her secret, and Sonny's (and Google's and 3M's and General Motor's), isn't practice-though that certainly helps. It's going to the beach to watch the waves and getting into the water to experiment.
      And if you're in the sweet spot when that superwave does come, Sonny says, "It's pure energy."

Superconnectors

Momentum

Simplicity

10 x Thinking

The secret sounds a bit crazy. Says Teller, "It's often easier to make something  10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better."
. . .
"The way of doing about trying to make something new or better often tends to polarize into one of two styles, " Teller says. "One is the low-variance, no surprises version of improvement. The production model, if you will. You tend to get '10 percent,' in order of magnitude, kind of improvements."
      "In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can't know ahead of time. It's by definition counter intuitive."
      Incremental progress, he says depends on working harder. More resources, more effort. 10x progress is built on bravery and creativity instead. Working smarter.

The brilliant "Smartcuts" by Shane Snow.