"Fuhgeddaboudit!"

As I continued to read On Writing, I continued to not only be more amused by King's witty humor, I learned more about writing than I could in any high school English text book. For example, King's innovative use of a metaphorical tool box to teach the essentials of writing was ingenious. He teaches the readers the important tools needed to become a prolific writer. His critical analysis of writing left me thinking of my own writing and of how much more I needed to learn to grow as a writer. He analyzed every aspect of writing from one's vocabulary to the actual story plot.

Before I read the toolbox, I always had the mind set that the more complex the sentence was, the better the sentence is. For example, I would sometimes add an adjective or two to make a sentence more intellectual or interesting. King, however, argues that this is unnecessary. He argues that a good writing is cutting out useless words and getting straight to the point. He points out that "simple sentences provide a path you can follow when you fear getting lost in the tangles of rhetoric."

King later gets further in depth with writing and its techniques. King's use of extended metaphors to describe certain aspects of writing kept me interested and eager with every chapter. For example, he portrays fossils as stories, and a good writer must learn how to undercover these precious fossils using his or her toolbox to produce a good story or book. He argues that writing and reading are key components to a good writer, and I couldn't agree more. Writers must read in order to improve his or her writing. Also, his belief that stories make themselves, and it is the writer's job to give them a place to grow is a great observation.

King's writing continues to astound me. With every page turn, I learn more and more about writing and how to improve myself as a writer. I look forward to the rest of the book.

"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. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus Rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same." -Stephen King