How Stephen King writes and why: Language, immersion, emotion

Abstract

Many successful novelists offer writing advice, but do they actually follow it themselves? And if so, can it truly account for the success of their novels? We dissect and examine three pieces of writing advice from Stephen King's book On Writing (2000). King counsels writers to (1) write in a simple language to aid readers' narrative immersion; (2) avoid -ly adverbs, especially in dialogue attribution; and (3) avoid the passive voice. We examine these three pieces of advice both theoretically, reviewing them in light of what we know about how literature affects readers from such fields as literary linguistics and evolutionary literary studies, and empirically, using a computational linguistics approach to test whether King follows his own advice and whether it can explain his success as a novelist. We find that King's advice about simple language makes sense if an author's goal is to sell books while his advice against -ly adverbs makes sense if the goal is instead literary recognition. For his advice against using the passive voice, we find no substantial theoretical or empirical basis.