Image by the USO, via Flickr Com­mons

In one of my favorite Stephen King inter­views, for The Atlantic, he talks at length about the vital impor­tance of a good open­ing line. “There are all sorts of the­o­ries,” he says, “it’s a tricky thing.” “But there’s one thing” he’s sure about: “An open­ing line should invite the read­er to begin the sto­ry. It should say: Lis­ten. Come in here. You want to know about this.” King’s dis­cus­sion of open­ing lines is com­pelling because of his dual focus as an avid read­er and a prodi­gious writer of fiction—he doesn’t lose sight of either per­spec­tive:

We’ve talked so much about the read­er, but you can’t for­get that the open­ing line is impor­tant to the writer, too. To the per­son who’s actu­al­ly boots-on-the-ground. Because it’s not just the reader’s way in, it’s the writer’s way in also, and you’ve got to find a door­way that fits us both.

This is excel­lent advice. As you ori­ent your read­er, so you ori­ent your­self, point­ing your work in the direc­tion it needs to go. Now King admits that he doesn’t think much about the open­ing line as he writes, in a first draft, at least. That per­fect­ly craft­ed and invit­ing open­ing sen­tence is some­thing that emerges in revi­sion, which can be where the bulk of a writer’s work hap­pens.

Revi­sion in the sec­ond draft, “one of them, any­way,” may “neces­si­tate some big changes” says King in his 2000 mem­oir slash writ­ing guide On Writ­ing. And yet, it is an essen­tial process, and one that “hard­ly ever fails.” Below, we bring you King’s top twen­ty rules from On Writ­ing. About half of these relate direct­ly to revi­sion. The oth­er half cov­er the intangibles—attitude, dis­ci­pline, work habits. A num­ber of these sug­ges­tions reli­ably pop up in every writer’s guide. But quite a few of them were born of Stephen King’s many decades of tri­al and error and—writes the Barnes & Noble book blog—“over 350 mil­lion copies” sold, “like them or loathe them.”

1. First write for your­self, and then wor­ry about the audi­ence. “When you write a sto­ry, you’re telling your­self the sto­ry. When you rewrite, your main job is tak­ing out all the things that are not the sto­ry.”

2. Don’t use pas­sive voice. “Timid writ­ers like pas­sive verbs for the same rea­son that timid lovers like pas­sive part­ners. The pas­sive voice is safe.”

3. Avoid adverbs. “The adverb is not your friend.”

4. Avoid adverbs, espe­cial­ly after “he said” and “she said.”

5. But don’t obsess over per­fect gram­mar. “The object of fic­tion isn’t gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness but to make the read­er wel­come and then tell a sto­ry.”

6. The mag­ic is in you. “I’m con­vinced that fear is at the root of most bad writ­ing.”

7. Read, read, read. ”If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”

8. Don’t wor­ry about mak­ing oth­er peo­ple hap­py. “If you intend to write as truth­ful­ly as you can, your days as a mem­ber of polite soci­ety are num­bered, any­way.”

9. Turn off the TV. “TV—while work­ing out or any­where else—really is about the last thing an aspir­ing writer needs.”

10. You have three months. “The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a sea­son.”

11. There are two secrets to suc­cess. “I stayed phys­i­cal­ly healthy, and I stayed mar­ried.”

12. Write one word at a time. “Whether it’s a vignette of a sin­gle page or an epic tril­o­gy like ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ the work is always accom­plished one word at a time.”

13. Elim­i­nate dis­trac­tion. “There should be no tele­phone in your writ­ing room, cer­tain­ly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with.”

14. Stick to your own style. “One can­not imi­tate a writer’s approach to a par­tic­u­lar genre, no mat­ter how sim­ple what that writer is doing may seem.”

15. Dig. “Sto­ries are relics, part of an undis­cov­ered pre-exist­ing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her tool­box to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as pos­si­ble.”

16. Take a break. “You’ll find read­ing your book over after a six-week lay­off to be a strange, often exhil­a­rat­ing expe­ri­ence.”

17. Leave out the bor­ing parts and kill your dar­lings. “(kill your dar­lings, kill your dar­lings, even when it breaks your ego­cen­tric lit­tle scribbler’s heart, kill your dar­lings.)”

18. The research shouldn’t over­shad­ow the sto­ry. “Remem­ber that word back. That’s where the research belongs: as far in the back­ground and the back sto­ry as you can get it.”

19. You become a writer sim­ply by read­ing and writ­ing. “You learn best by read­ing a lot and writ­ing a lot, and the most valu­able lessons of all are the ones you teach your­self.”

20. Writ­ing is about get­ting hap­py. “Writ­ing isn’t about mak­ing mon­ey, get­ting famous, get­ting dates, get­ting laid or mak­ing friends. Writ­ing is mag­ic, as much as the water of life as any oth­er cre­ative art. The water is free. So drink.”

See a fuller expo­si­tion of King’s writ­ing wis­dom at Barnes & Noble’s blog.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The 69 Pages of Writ­ing Advice Denis John­son Col­lect­ed from Flan­nery O’Connor, Jack Ker­ouac, Stephen King, Hunter Thomp­son, Wern­er Her­zog & Many Oth­ers

7 Tips From Ernest Hem­ing­way on How to Write Fic­tion

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Stephen King’s Top 10 All-Time Favorite Books

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The life of Russ­ian-born poet, nov­el­ist, crit­ic, and first female psy­chol­o­gist Lou Andreas-Salomé has pro­vid­ed fod­der for both sala­cious spec­u­la­tion and intel­lec­tu­al dra­ma in film and on the page for the amount of roman­tic atten­tion she attract­ed from Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als like philoso­pher Paul Rée, poet Ranier Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Niet­zsche. Emo­tion­al­ly intense Niet­zsche became infat­u­at­ed with Salomé, pro­posed mar­riage, and, when she declined, broke off their rela­tion­ship in abrupt Niet­zschean fash­ion.

For her part, Salomé so val­ued these friend­ships she made a pro­pos­al of her own: that she, Niet­zsche and Rée, writes D.A. Bar­ry at 3:AM Mag­a­zine, “live togeth­er in a celi­bate house­hold where they might dis­cuss phi­los­o­phy, lit­er­a­ture and art.” The idea scan­dal­ized Nietzsche’s sis­ter and his social cir­cle and may have con­tributed to the “pas­sion­ate crit­i­cism” Salomé’s 1894 bio­graph­i­cal study, Friedrich Niet­zsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reap­praisal, Bar­ry argues, as “a psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait.”

In Niet­zsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sor­row­ful ail­ing and tri­umphal recov­ery, incan­des­cent intox­i­ca­tion and cool con­scious­ness. One sens­es here the close entwin­ing of mutu­al con­tra­dic­tions; one sens­es the over­flow­ing and vol­un­tary plunge of over-stim­u­lat­ed and tensed ener­gies into chaos, dark­ness and ter­ror, and then an ascend­ing urge toward the light and most ten­der moments.” We might see this pas­sage as charged by the remem­brance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the con­cept of the Eter­nal Recur­rence ‘in a qui­et voice with all the signs of deep­est hor­ror.’”

We should also, per­haps pri­mar­i­ly, see Salomé’s impres­sions as an effect of Nietzsche’s tur­bu­lent prose, reach­ing its apoth­e­o­sis in his exper­i­men­tal­ly philo­soph­i­cal nov­el, Thus Spake Zarathus­tra. As a the­o­rist of the embod­i­ment of ideas, of their inex­tri­ca­ble rela­tion to the phys­i­cal and the social, Niet­zsche had some very spe­cif­ic ideas about lit­er­ary style, which he com­mu­ni­cat­ed to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teach­ing of Style.” Well before writ­ers began issu­ing “sim­i­lar sets of com­mand­ments,” writes Maria Popo­va at Brain Pick­ings, Niet­zsche “set down ten styl­is­tic rules of writ­ing,” which you can find, in their orig­i­nal list form, below.

1. Of prime neces­si­ty is life: a style should live.

2. Style should be suit­ed to the spe­cif­ic per­son with whom you wish to com­mu­ni­cate. (The law of mutu­al rela­tion.)

3. First, one must deter­mine pre­cise­ly “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writ­ing must be mim­ic­ry.

4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in gen­er­al have for his mod­el a very expres­sive kind of pre­sen­ta­tion of neces­si­ty, the writ­ten copy will appear much paler.

5. The rich­ness of life reveals itself through a rich­ness of ges­tures. One must learn to feel every­thing — the length and retard­ing of sen­tences, inter­punc­tu­a­tions, the choice of words, the paus­ing, the sequence of argu­ments — like ges­tures.

6. Be care­ful with peri­ods! Only those peo­ple who also have long dura­tion of breath while speak­ing are enti­tled to peri­ods. With most peo­ple, the peri­od is a mat­ter of affec­ta­tion.

7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.

8. The more abstract a truth which one wish­es to teach, the more one must first entice the sens­es.

9. Strat­e­gy on the part of the good writer of prose con­sists of choos­ing his means for step­ping close to poet­ry but nev­er step­ping into it.

10. It is not good man­ners or clever to deprive one’s read­er of the most obvi­ous objec­tions. It is very good man­ners and very clever to leave it to one’s read­er alone to pro­nounce the ulti­mate quin­tes­sence of our wis­dom.

As with all such pre­scrip­tions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s per­spec­tivism has been (mis)interpreted as wan­ton sub­jec­tiv­i­ty, his ven­er­a­tion for antiq­ui­ty places a high val­ue on for­mal con­straints. His prose, we might say, resides in that ten­sion between Dionysian aban­don and Apol­lon­ian cool, and his rules address what lib­er­al arts pro­fes­sors once called the Triv­i­um: gram­mar, rhetoric, and log­ic: the three sup­ports of mov­ing, expres­sive, per­sua­sive writ­ing.

Salomé was so impressed with these apho­ris­tic rules that she includ­ed them in her biog­ra­phy, remark­ing, “to exam­ine Nietzsche’s style for caus­es and con­di­tions means far more than exam­in­ing the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can lis­ten to his inner sound­ings.” Isn’t this what great writ­ing should feel like?

Salomé wrote in her study that “Niet­zsche not only mas­tered lan­guage but also tran­scend­ed its inad­e­qua­cies.” (As Niet­zsche him­self com­ment­ed in 1886, notes Hugo Dro­chon, he need­ed to invent “a lan­guage of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-dis­ci­plined writ­ing found a com­ple­ment in Salomé’s bold­ly keen analy­sis. From her we can also per­haps glean anoth­er prin­ci­ple: “No mat­ter how calum­nious the pub­lic attacks on her,” writes Bar­ry, “par­tic­u­lar­ly from [his sis­ter] Elis­a­beth Förster-Niet­zsche dur­ing the Nazi peri­od in Ger­many, Salomé did not respond to them.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2016.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

Wal­ter Kaufmann’s Clas­sic Lec­tures on Niet­zsche, Kierkegaard and Sartre (1960)

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness