Plumbers in Space

Since the Atlantic posted an interview with Stephen King regarding his thoughts on teaching writing, there have been a number of echoes on the web. I came across this one on LinkedIn in which the author notes that several of King’s musings from the book On Writing proved valuable even to the process of writing non-fiction pieces, although King is better known as a fiction writer. The author notes that King’s confidential style spoke to him as a person and helped boost his confidence as a writer. The last section of the blog post devoted to lessons gleaned from King deals with “what to write” and is worth reviewing if you are scratching your head over that very question. More than once, it assures you that whatever you want is fine, even if it’s “plumbers in space.” Seeing that advice reminded me of the Scottish Book Trust  creative writing master class series with Keith Gray on YouTube which includes a suggestion to try mixing up genres to create fresh material.

While you are waiting for the various disparate pieces of your ideas to fall into place, you can surely do worse than King’s classic advice to “read a lot.”