Lessons from Zinsser and King: On Writing

This month, as I started taking writing seriously, two books kept coming up in every conversation and recommendation: On Writing Well by William Zinsser, and On Writing by Stephen King.
William Zinsser, a journalist, editor, and longtime teacher at Yale was the quiet champion of clean, honest nonfiction. He wrote On Writing Well by hand—literally, with a pen. A book that didn’t just teach mechanics, but fundamentally changed how people think about nonfiction.
Stephen King, on the other hand, is a master of storytelling in the wildest sense. With over 60 novels and 400 million copies sold, he’s one of the most widely read writers in the world. But beneath the horror, King is a deeply practical craftsman—obsessed with rhythm, honesty, and showing up to do the work every day.
The two are prolific writers and masters of their craft. Despite their opposing worlds, they speak in surprising unison when it comes to the art of writing well.
So today, I’ve pulled their core lessons together—their shared rules that resonated with me most. The practice, not theory. The stuff that actually helps when you’re alone with the page, trying to put something honest into words.
1. Think and write clearly
Before you do anything else, write clearly.
Zinsser begins with a foundational idea: Writing is thinking made visible. To write clearly, you first have to think clearly—which is exactly why it’s hard:
“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”
Clarity creates strength. But to make our sentences strong, we need to strip it down to its cleanest components. Remove the weak adulterants from our thinking:
- Every word that serves no function
- Every long word that could be a short word
- Every adverb that merely repeats the verb’s meaning
- Every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what
To think clearly, you have to constantly look at what you’ve written and ask:
- What am I trying to say?
- Have I said it?
- Is it clear to someone seeing this for the first time?
Structure, vocabulary and grammar may seem dull—but they’re your sharpest tools for writing clearly. Express yourself, but don’t be sloppy. Or as King puts it:
Writing is refined thinking… If your master’s thesis is no more organised than a high school essay titled ‘Why Shania Twain Turns Me On,’ you’re in big trouble.
2. Clutter = weakness
Zinsser calls it for what it is:
“Clutter is the disease of writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon.”
Weak words come from weak thinking. We write passively because we don’t trust the reader to get what we mean. So we add clutter, just in case:
“Clutter is the laborious phrase that has pushed out the short word that means the same thing… In careless writing, strong verbs are weakened by redundant adverbs. So are adjectives and other parts of speech: “effortlessly easy,” “slightly spartan,” “totally flabbergasted.”
Writing improves in direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out of it that shouldn’t be there. It’s the life-changing magic of tidying up for writers.
King agrees: clutter is fear in disguise. Fear of being misunderstood, of not sounding smart enough, of not being good enough. But good writing means making better use of your tools:
“Good writing is about letting go of fear and affectation… It’s making good choices when it comes to picking the tools you plan to work with.”
Yes, it’s hard to kill your darlings. To ruthlessly cull your passive verbs, your qualifiers and your adverbs that hedge you against being misunderstood. But as King warns, they’ll take over your lawn:
“They’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s – GASP!! – too late.”
3. Write for yourself
Authenticity creates a spark that connects to audience. To prioritise authenticity, you have to do three things:
- You must relax
- You must have confidence
- You must not seek approval
Don’t imagine a faceless audience and try to please them. Instead, Zinsser encourages you to write what delights you as the writer:
“You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for.”
King puts it this way: we should write the first draft with the door closed.
“This first draft… should be written with no help (or interference) from anyone else. There may come a point when you want to show what you’re doing to a close friend, either because you’re proud of what you’re doing or because you’re doubtful about it. My best advice is to resist this impulse. Keep the pressure on; don’t lower it by exposing what you’ve written to the doubt, the praise, or even the well-meaning questions of someone from the Outside World. Let your hope of success (and your fear of failure) carry you on, difficult as that can be.”
But inevitably, we’re all approval-seeking toddlers. We open the door and emerge:
“I kept peeking over at her [Tabby] to see if she was chuckling (or at least smiling)…About five minutes later, I heard a snort of laughter from my right. Just a little one, but it was enough for me… The truth is that most writers are needy. Especially between the first draft and the second, when the study door swings open and the light of the world shines in.”
We want to express ourselves in earnest and know our words meant something. That we did some good. But that’s also when we risk losing the thread.
And that leads to the next point…
4. Don’t dress it up
Once you’ve stripped your writing down to its bare essentials, you can then build it back up. The trick is don’t aim to impress. Communicate. Don’t be impatient to be “stylish”. Be yourself. Zinsser saves us from embarrassment:
“Trying to add style is like adding a toupee. At first glance the formerly bald man looks young and even handsome. But at second glance—and with a toupee there’s always a second glance—he doesn’t look quite right. The problem is not that he doesn’t look well groomed; he does, and we can only admire the wigmaker’s skill. The point is that he doesn’t look like himself.”
Style should come from clarity, not from decoration. The problem is when you try to garnish your prose. King adds:
“Fear is at the root of most bad writing… dressing up vocabulary because you’re ashamed of your short words…Put your vocabulary on the top shelf of your toolbox, and don’t make any conscious effort to improve it…that comes later”
Don’t put on airs. The reader can always tell.
That’s why your best bet is to…
5. Tell the truth
Write like a human and say what comes to mind. Good writing sounds like unfiltered thinking, as King puts it:
“The basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful… If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word – of course you will, there’s always another word – but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.”
Zinsser agrees. If it’s not how you talk, don’t write it:
“Never say anything in writing that you wouldn’t comfortably say in conversation. If you’re not a person who says “indeed” or “moreover,” or who calls someone an individual (“he’s a fine individual”), please don’t write it.”
This is why reading your writing aloud is such a powerful editing tool. If it sounds stiff, fake, or overly formal, it probably is.
The same goes for good dialogue, whether quoting an interviewee in non-fiction or writing a character in fiction. Their words will always be better than your words. Even if you’re the most elegant stylist in the land, they have their own index of truth. Zinsser explains:
“They carry the inflection of his speaking voice and the idiosyncrasies of how he puts a sentence together. They contain the regionalisms of his conversation and the lingo of his trade. They convey his enthusiasms. This is a person talking to the reader directly, not through the filter of a writer.”
Let characters talk like real people—even if it’s ugly. It’s a breath of cool, refreshing air in a room some people would prefer to keep shut. King sums it up politely:
“Never say ‘John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion’ when you mean ‘John stopped to take a shit.’”
6. Let writing reveal itself
Sometimes we start with outlines, bullets and a multi-point thesis in five parts. But good writing is often unexpected and improvised. It unfolds and finds its own shape. King believes this deeply:
“My basic belief about the making of stories is that they pretty much make themselves. The job of the writer is to give them a place to grow”
King detests plot. He thinks it makes stories feel “artificial and laboured.” Instead of controlling everything, he drops character into a situation and watches what happens:
“I put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work themselves free. My job isn’t to help them work their way free, or manipulate them to safety… but to watch what happens and then write it down. The situation comes first. The characters – always flat and unfeatured, to begin with – come next… I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way.”
Even in nonfiction, we’re tempted by drawing up big complex narratives with an array of winding arguments and extended explanations. But Zinsser advises the opposite:
“Think small. Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be content to cover it well and stop.”
Follow the energy. Be willing to change course. Trust what emerges. This unfolding may be take you somewhere unexpected, but that may be a good thing:
“Trust your material if it’s taking you into terrain you didn’t intend to enter but where the vibrations are good. Adjust your style accordingly and proceed to whatever destination you reach. Don’t become the prisoner of a preconceived plan. Writing is no respecter of blueprints.”
And if things get messy? It’s just a matter of pulling out the scissors:
“If this happens, the second part of your article will be badly out of joint with the first. But at least you know which part is truest to your instincts. Then it’s just a matter of making repairs. Go back to the beginning and rewrite it so that your mood and your style are consistent from start to finish.”
7. Rewrite to find the thread
Rewriting is the act of sculpting. The form of your writing is revealed by chiselling away at it. Zinsser underscores its importance:
“Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or lost.”
King’s formula is simple: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%.
He emphasises the same idea:
“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,’ he said. ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”
The first read-through is for cleaning up the surface. Removing passive constructions, trimming adverbs, tightening your vocabulary. Then rewriting is refinement: reshaping, tightening and clarifying the raw material you laid down on your first try. Zinsser tells us to find the thread and carry it all the way through:
Make sure you’ve given the reader a narrative flow he can follow with no trouble from beginning to end. Keep putting yourself in the reader’s place.
Meanwhile, King looks deeper for symbolism, theme and resonance:
Underneath you’re asking the big questions: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme? What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader’s mind (and heart) after he or she has closed the book and put it up on the shelf.
Once you’ve found it, you only need to pull it out:
Most of all, I’m looking for what I meant, because in the second draft I’ll want to add scenes and incidents that reinforce that meaning. I’ll also want to delete stuff that goes in other directions. There’s apt to be a lot of that stuff, especially near the beginning of a story, when I have a tendency to flail. All that thrashing around has to go if I am to achieve anything like a unified effect.
Let the draft sit. Then return to it with sharp tools and fresh eyes.
And then rewrite. rewrite. rewrite.
Rewrite until the story knows what it is.
8. Read a lot
Zinsser begins in brutalist fashion:
“You learn to write by reading good writing.”
Reading feeds your instinct for rhythm, style, and clarity. It’s not optional. It’s fuel.
King keeps it simple:
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
King himself gets through 70-80 books a year, mostly fiction, but he doesn’t read to study the craft, he reads because he likes to read. Yet there’s always a lesson going on:
Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing – of being flattened, in fact – is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.
He believes reading creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing. And Zinsser agrees:
By reading other writers you also plug yourself into a longer tradition that enriches you. Sometimes you will tap a vein of eloquence or racial memory that gives your writing a depth it could never attain on its own.
In the end, King reminds us that output runs on input:
If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
9. Write a lot
No advice is more repeated—or more true. Zinsser put it plainly:
You learn to write by writing… The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.
King is known for his discipline, only under dire circumstances, allowing himself to shut down before he gets his 2,000 words.
Each piece of writing presents its own challenges: structure, tone, order, clarity. You only get better at solving these problems by encountering them often. Zinsser reminds us:
“Keep your tools sharpened by constant use.”
King agrees, it’s not just the tools that dull. Without effort, even our stories start to go stale:
If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind – they begin to seem like characters instead of real people…
Writing is best when it’s inspired play. But sometimes the words come hard. In the end, we still have to put our words down. It’s always that simple.
A radio host once asked King how he writes. He didn’t explain, didn’t elaborate—just left the host hanging with a single answer:
“One word at a time.”
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