Put forth your thoughts with conviction and intensity.

In the part of “On Writing” entitled CV, King says that in the earlier years of his marriage, it occurred to him that he was simply repeating his mother’s life. “I’d think, this isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then I’d think, half the world has the same idea”. King’s concept of a story is that it is a pre-existing thing, a fossil in the ground. Through writing, King was able to unearth the story of his life as a writer, the tools that worked and those that did not work so well. It was only by trial and error that he was able to discover all of the knowledge that he seeks to impart through “On Writing”, and this is King’s greatest lesson to us as readers and aspiring writers and editors: read a lot, write a lot, and after that, for the most part, be your own teacher.
In high school, my English teacher told me never to write “I think” or “I believe” before a statement. “I think”, suggests that one does not “know” and this is problematic because writing is supposed to convince the reader of something. For King, “writing has always been best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin”. His tastes parallel my own. The reader should feel the force of the writing, an energy that transcends time and space.
Among King’s major dislikes in regard to writing, a couple of them stood out to me as similar to what I dislike. First, King tells his readers, “You should avoid the passive tense”. Later, he says that he loathes adverbs and, in most cases, dialogue attribution, for reasons that come back to the same main point: if one is to be a good writer, one must bury the notion that he can also be a timid writer. “Writing is seduction”, says King, and I, for one, am convinced that I cannot be seduced by shy, half-hearted language.
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“On Living: A Postscript”, along with the final pages of “On Writing” expose the part of King that is profoundly human. He writes in clear detail about the 1999 accident that almost took his life. King says that, “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life”. I have found this to be true, although whatever one’s passion is can have the same effect. With writing, as with anything else, one must be prepared to try and fail and try again and know that this is the only way to succeed. This sense of purpose invigorates a person and, quite literally, can bring them back to life.
This last portion of the book stirred me and caused me to consider my reality. As a soon-to-be graduate, I have been contemplating my future a great deal these days. King concludes the “On Writing” portion of his book by stating that he is not, and has never been, in writing for the money. He says, “I have written because it fulfilled me…I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever”. This conveys a passion for one’s career that far transcends what I could ever have envisioned for myself five years ago at the start of college. Now, however, I see that this is the only way to live rather than simply exist.