My wife and I laughed so hard at the Pow Incident that tears - but no sounds - came out. I was delighted to gain so many insights into the experiences that affected King's life and his novels. I was unaware of his addiction to cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs or poverty as a child and an aspiring writer.

Although King asserts that integrity is the basis of all effective writing, I thought he equivocated at least once in the book. Presumably, his addictions cost money, but King says he was too poor to purchase medicine his little girl need for chronic ear infections. Did she go without while he did not? King does not tell us.

Despite this lapse, the book is an excellent read and a fresh outlook on an otherwise dull subject. I look forward to using some of its lessons in my high school English classes or putting them into practice the next time I publish.

New to me was King's advice on quotation attribution, which he says is the same as giving stage directions. His point is a good one: the character should speak in such a way that the reader understands the delivery is terse, angry, nervous, etc. Let the verb summarize the manner.

By so doing, the writer says more by saying less, meaning that adding an adverb after the quotation is unnecessary.

This book serves two audiences well: published writers and would be. There is much to be mined in it.

To his considerable credit, Mr. King wrote much of this book while in physical pain and he appears to give his readers an honest, unvarnished look at his life and his experiences with writing. The theme of honesty, both as it is delivered in this work and as discussed in the context of writing, makes it well worth reading.

Unfortunately, there's no getting around the fact that it's sloppily written, full of unnecessarity profanities (he's a writer; can't he do better than shock value?) and there obviously wasn't too much time spent analyzing the first draft and teasing out more than a straight narrative of events. Retentive types can even have an exciting time finding the misspelled word (hint: it's a proper name) and noting the repeated improper use of ellipsis, which takes some of the credibility out of the grammar lecture section. King's devotion to and appreciation of his wife is touching and genuine, though the book jacket says she's also a novelist and I was left wondering why this fact wasn't given at least a little more ink.

Despite how hard he has worked at writing, his admitted lack of confidence even now is well, frightening. This was a valuable lesson to me in itself. Even when I wished he'd done some things differently, the theme of honesty and King's willingness to open himself up to us were so consistent and refreshing I just didn't want to stop reading.

If you're looking for a book to help improve your own writing, this contains some very good and unique pointers and quite a few you will have heard before. If you liked Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, you'll like this; it's the same wonderfully encouraging, life-is-messy look at the whole process and King will very likely inspire you to believe in yourself and your own vision more than you already do; he's a master at dealing with self doubt.

It's good; I just wished he'd spent more time on it.

Anyone who wants to write, whether they be short stories or novels, should read this book. Stephen King began writing stories at a young age and had his fair share of rejections. He took odd jobs, lived through difficult times, but through it all, he continued writing. Unlike other books on the craft of writing, Stephen King does not impose a whole set of rules upon the aspiring writer. He has a few rules of thumb, but that's it.

Reading this book liberated me from all those rules and encouraged me to write again. All those excuses not to write, the ones that pop up just as I'm about to hit the writing table, I deal with them by remembering how Stephen King wrote most of his stories and novels. He just sat down, sometimes in a cramped room under not too pleasant conditions, and wrote. Since reading this book three weeks ago, I have one completed short story and the words just keep flowing!