Foreword and There After (Response on Stephen King’s "On Writing")

I tend to never read the Foreword (or Preface, Prelude, Introduction, etc.) of a book because most of them tend be daunting, long, tedious and very boring. Sometimes as a reader you do not quite understand what is being talked about until you read the actual book. Sometimes these beginning are just spoilers and then your not motivated to read such a book. And I was ready to do just that skip the Forewords (yes, more then one) of Stephen King’s On Writing because that is just something I do sadly. However, while skimming past the Second Foreword I noticed the word bull@#$! Mention a few times and decided well now why would the author go and swear in the beginning like that, and so it began the reading of the forward.

King wrote in his Foreword (his first one) that as a writer “he care[d] about the language…and care[d] passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper” (King 9) and it is because of this idea he choose to write this book. Expecting this book to be more textbook then memoir-esq I was prepared to be told how I should write and how I should display my thoughts on paper but I ended up being intrigued by a different idea once I began to read:

Right away, King states that a writer is a person who has a nature to express their creativity and imagination differently. Much like being gifted at a certain type of sport and excelling far better then those around you. Everyone through practice can choose to play any sport of their choosing but sometimes there are people who just achieve skill naturally. From my analysis it seems that King is saying that everyone can be a writer and in fact that he imagines that many people are but not everyone can excel at being an author. I use the word author because it is separate from a writer. If you can sit down and write short story after short story then you’re an author. If you can take the time and write a critical essay or a scholarly journal then you’re an author. It is what separates you from just being a writer. College students, high school students and work professionals write things every day, but usually for assignment. There is no sense of imaginative creativity involved that an author would use to write a critical essay or a short story because you are already given the idea of what write.

The build up of personal events to the one important even helped give me a sense of who King was before he became a writer and an author. His childhood was colorful to say the least and through his creative childhood he was allowed to develop his skills as a writer. His mother encouraging him to stop copying the comics he loved and create his own stories was a great novelty for King. His mother was the first person he wrote his stories for and she was the first person to buy them. It seems to me to be a very good lesson that a parent should encourage their kids especially if they have potential. King’s mother never told him to try to do something else, but she helped him understand the importance of his own words by showing him that they mean something. That is why it “was the first buck [he] made in [the] business” (King 29).