On writing by Steven King, since I am not native English speaker, I am worse than bad write he mentioned. Even though, I could learn a lot from this book. I am a scientist. I have to be a good writer enough to describe the truth we found to the other scientist and sometime to general people. I will quote sentences from Steven King, which has encouraged me to write more and better.
“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” (This is actually from Gould who is New England humorist or novelist)
When I finish my draft, I usually leave it at least for a day, and then I revise what I write. My first draft usually has a lot of mistakes that I have to avoid. I can find them with fresh eyes when I read next day. And more important, it usually has a lot of unnecessary words and sentences because I am ashamed of writing too little.
“If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”
I am writing. I need to be serious. No, I want to be serious. I want to be better writer because I like it. I do make mistakes and but I will improve. I prefer quantity to quality for now. Only I can do now is keep writing as seriously as I could be.
“Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary. – – It ain’t how much you’ve got, honey, it’s how you use it.”
“Put you vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it. (You will be doing that as you read, of course … but that comes later.) One of the really bad things you can do to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones.
When I was a student, beginner in English, I wanted to improve my vocabulary as many as I could. And, I was trying to use difficult words or phrase to impress someone. Yes, I was immature. We don’t need dress up by using the vocabulary we barely know. We just need simple sentences to express our ideas. For vocabulary, I also believe reading would help to improve a lot, not at once, but surely that would happen sometime.
“The subject is just letting it happen; you should avoid the passive tense.”
Mr. William Strunk said so in “the element of style”, and also Mr. William Zinssern wrote in “On writing”. They said the same thing. Think about it. If you have to read passive tense, sometime you need to read back. To let reader’s eyes move forward.
This is not end of book review, I will keep write this review later.