creative writing

Stephen King’s On Writing is a great resource for anyone who wants to become a better writer. Although King’s memoir mainly targets fiction writers, I believe that many of his opinions on writing can be used by all writers. Whether you are writing a blog, co-op report, literature review, cover letter, etc., King’s tips about writing will be useful to you.

Here are four of King’s tips about writing that will help you and your writing process.

Image from: Book Writer Career

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So fanfiction is a thing that exists.

Valentine’s Day is coming up and I’ve been thinking about my relationship

You’re sitting in your little wooden cubicle at the corner of an office. Your laptop is open in front of you; a picture of a black cat stares at you. Its lime-green eyes look into yours.

You maximize your Microsoft Word document. It’s blindingly white.

You lean back on your soft green office chair and sigh. You spin around, facing away from your cubicle. You look at the clock on the white wall to your left: 3:55PM.

You notice that you are bouncing your right leg.

In the last few weeks I’ve been listening to the Mortified podcast, which features adults reading their adolescent diaries in front of a live audience, with no exaggeration, no embellishment, “just god-given awkwardness”. Every episode is guaranteed to produce cringing smiles.

I kept a diary of my own for six years, running from grade nine through my first year of university.

During my undergraduate years at the University of Toronto, I took a class on a Roman poet named Catullus. For a long semester I laboured over his poetry, trying to wrestle his sophisticated Latin phrases into easy English.  From all the hundreds of lines of his poetry that I worked on, one word stands out in my memory: palmulas.