Quote of the Week...from Stephen King

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.      ---Stephen King.

I've read more Stephen King books over the years that those of any other author...he's by far my favorite writer of this era.  One of his books that impressed me...it was one of his few nonfiction works...was On Writing, a semi-autobiographical book that went into what it takes to write successfully.  King was frank: you have to have the knack for it...like many other fields, innate talent does play an important role.  But one can have all the talent in the world for any area, and if they don't arduously apply it by working hard to develop that talent, then they're not going to go anywhere with it.  With writing, King stresses spending about an equal amount of time...at least four hours a day each...between reading others' works and actually engaging in writing.  And writing talent won't develop on its own...one has to write, write, write...and then write some more...

Seeing that I work full-time at my job and can't realistically see myself putting in eight daily hours of reading and writing...at least not until retirement day eventually comes around...I'm going to need to fudge a bit on Stephen King's minimum standard for developing whatever writing talent I have.  Although it may seem to a reader of this blog that I read a lot...and I do compared to most folks...it's still less than I would like.  And my writing?  Other than this blog, the articles for which I usually whip up in 30-40 minutes while sipping my iced coffee at Starbucks (where I'm at now) or McDonald's, I haven't been writing...so between the two King-recommended regimens of reading and writing, my great, glaring need is to write more.  And to begin to write fiction.  Fortunately for me, I've been at work on this blog coming up on ten years in about a week, and I've consciously, deliberately made it available worldwide...and in the past four years have linked it to Facebook so that people who know me could read it, too.  So I shouldn't feel too self-conscious about publishing my first fictional stories.  Except that, right now, I do.  Well, the only remedy I see for that is to shift into turbo with my writing...