King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story, and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from H.P. Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote.

King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. --Tim Appelo

Adult/High School-By the time King was 14, the scads of rejection slips he'd accumu-lated grew too heavy for the nail in the wall on which they were mounted. He replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing. This straight-up book inspires without being corny, and teens suspicious of adult rhap-sodies to perseverance will let down their guard and be put at ease by the book's gritty conversational tone. The first 100 pages are pure memoir-paeans to the horror movies and fanzines that captivated King as a child, the expected doses of misadventure (weeks of detention for distributing his own satirical zine at school; building an electromagnet that took out the electricity of half a street), and hard times. King writes just as passion-ately in the second half of the book, where the talk turns to his craft. He provides plenty of samples of awkward or awful writing and contrasts them with polished versions. Hand this title to reluctant readers and reluctant writers, sit back, and watch what happens.-Emily Lloyd, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

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" A one-of-a-kind classic. "

" This is a special book, animated by a unique intelligence, and filled with useful truth. "

"On Writing had more useful and observant things to say about the craft than any book since Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. "

"The best book on writing. Ever. "

"Tthis combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction's most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it's a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative."

"With examples that reach from T. S. Eliot to pulp fiction, there's much trenchant material here on how to construct a story, how to revise, and how to go about building a career...This is unmistakably King: friendly, sharply perceptive, cheerfully vulgar, sometimes adolescent in his humor, sometimes impatient with fools, but always sincere in his love of language and writing. "